ClickUp Relationships Tutorial (How & Why to Use This Feature)

There's a lot of talk about the relationships feature built into ClickUp. Relationships and their counterpart rollups are super helpful when it comes to connecting different tasks together without having to retype a bunch of data. But in my conversations with many of you, in some of the comments I've seen on videos, including the one over here, where we talked about using relationships to build a CRM in ClickUp, it became kind of clear that the concept of relationships and particularly rollups, it's a bit confusing. So in this video, I want to actually pull up a slide deck here and talk a little bit about what the heck are relationships in a big picture sense. What, what do they actually do? Why would you even need to use them? And then once we kind of all have a foundational understanding of relationships, I'm going to show you how you would then build those inside of ClickUp. So if you're someone who watched that CRM video I mentioned earlier, or you've just heard people talk about the relationships field or, you know, custom relationships in ClickUp, and you never quite understood what they were talking about, stay tuned. Here we have a task where the name of the task is Layla, and we have a few pieces of data associated with that task, and then we have a dropdown custom field. This is just a regular old dropdown with three options in it. These three options, as you see right here, are the three different roles in this imaginary business. And we're going to connect the task to the roles by using a dropdown. This is kind of what it would look like written out. And in ClickUp, if you were to flip this over, it would look something like this, right? You have a task named Layla, you have a few fields associated with it, and then you have that dropdown custom field. Now, before relationships existed, this is exactly how we would relate two different pieces of information together. We would have a dropdown value of, say, CEO and a task called Layla. But overall, this kind of relationship between a task and a custom field is fairly limited because, yes, we have a lot of space to write things about Layla here, but we don't have a lot of space to write information or context around the role of CEO. It's just text. There's no other details we can add there. So that's where relationships, that feature that ClickUp now has is really powerful because rather than having this kind of situation, we can instead make two separate, separate tasks and connect them together. That is the relationship. So task number one would be Layla, the exact one we just saw. And rather than a drop down Custom field, we would build a link a bridge to another list of tasks, in this case our list of roles. And of those roles we'd have a task called CEO and we relate those two things together. On the task side over here you'd see the role and on the CEO side over here you'd see the person in the role. But that overall relationship, that link, the name of that bridge is Person enroll and that bridge itself is our relationship. So looking at this in ClickUp here, flip this forward. Here you see that we have Leila Pomper on the left and CEO on the right. In ClickUp this relationship shows underneath the task description below the checklist or subtasks and it's under the aptly named header of Relationships. So here we can see over on the CEO side we've named this side of the relationship who's in the role. And on the other side we just call it the roles that the person's in. This link between the two is a relationship. So over here I could click Add, browse all of the different roles and connect those two things together without retyping information. This is like a two way hyperlink because between two different tasks and pulling them together. So to show you what this looks like, to build this out in ClickUp we have here a task called CEO. I'm going to click inside it, I'm going to scroll down until I see the Relationships icon and click Add Custom Relationship. Oh, and I should probably note here if you are not seeing the Relationship field when you scroll into the Add new column area over here, if you don't see these guys or if you don't see the Relationship section, when you actually go inside the task, odds are you do not have the Relationship Click app enabled, meaning you've turned this feature off by accident. To adjust this feature and to turn on relationships, you're going to need to click on your workspace settings as an admin. In your workspace, click on click Apps right here and then search for the option around Relationships. This is what's going to allow you to see all of the features I'm talking about here today. If you do not have this turned on, your workspace will look a little different and you will only see dependencies and task links in relationships. It just won't work the same way. Once you have this on though, you should be good to go and we're ready to get back to the tutorial. I'm going to scroll down until I see the Relationships icon and click Add Custom Relationship. There's multiple Ways to create this. You could also create it as a column. Works the same way. But this is how I'm going to do it here. I'm going to name the relationship and I'm going to choose one what list I want to connect this to because I could choose any task anywhere. But generally it's more convenient and you have more power if you pick a specific list. So in this case, I'm going to relate roles to my team directory. We'll talk a little bit here about this roll up setting in a second, but I'm going to click Create. And now all of a sudden I have this relationship dropdown option. I can now click Add and look for all the people or dogs in this case in my team directory and relate them to to the CEO role. So I'm going to click on Ollie here. You can see a picture of Ollie over there. If I click on Ollie, it takes me into the team directory where I have a bunch of tasks representing team members. That is the two way bridge we're creating. That's the link between the two and that is the relationship. We could create this relationship from either side. I have a few little filters here in this demo account, but I could go into a column and create it the same exact way if I wanted to create a new one from scratch. So I. So I would go into add new type relationship, click relationship here. Either way, it does the same thing. It adds it to the entire list and builds that relationship to whatever destination you choose. Here. Now, I promised we were going to talk about this little question, and I feel like this is probably a good time to segue into that. So let's talk about rollups. We can do a lot more than just link the names and have them show up in two places. Yes, it is nice to be able to see that the CEO is related to the Layla task. That's helpful. But wouldn't it also be nice to see other information about the Layla task without having to click over into it? And likewise, we see that Layla is in the CEO task. That's helpful. But wouldn't it be nice to see more information here about what is happening in that CEO task without having to go over into that task? Well, that is where the rollup field comes in handy. Whereas a relationship is just a bridge, a rollup is like the cars traveling over that bridge, if you will. So once we have the relationship right here, connecting person to role or role to person, depending on the side you're looking at it, we can then send other data or pool Other data through that relationship. So once we say that Layla and CEO are related, I can say, hey, don't just show me the person or don't just show me the role. Also tell me the status of my related tasks. Okay, so that kind of condition, that additional thing we want to find out and that additional information we want to pull over, that is what a rollup is doing. This link here is establishing the relationship. These two are connected. But rather than just telling us that the CEO role is connected, we also have a field telling us what is the status of that role in the list that it's on. Okay, so in this case the CEO role is filled. That's good to know. Gives me a little job security here. And we can have that data show up back here in the relationship kind of overview area. So I can know that without even having to click in to a particular task. So to show how this works inside ClickUp, I'm going to do the same kind of thing I did before. Whether it is on an actual column view or inside a task, I'm going to go look for a relationship that already exists just to make it easier. So in this case I'm going to go into the Layla task and I can see the roles relationship is there. So I'm just going to put Layla in a role, let's say CEO and I'm going to click on the plus sign next to it because this is an existing relationship, I just want to add a roll up to it. In this case I'm going to add the roll up for the, let's just say the status. So this is the status of the CEO task showing up as a preview inside the relationship preview area. I could also pull in other data like maybe I want to know, let's say date created, when was this role created? And I can even give it a custom name so it shows up differently here. Click add and here we go. Row created in May of 2021. And now we have more and more data just pulling into this relationships space here. So there you go. That is your crash course on the relationships and rollups logic and how they work in ClickUp. If this was an interesting video to you and you'd like to learn more about the technical side of organizing things in ClickUp, I think you might enjoy these videos. Next, if you have any questions, of course leave them in the comments below. But until next time, thanks for watching and enjoy. Sam.