ClickUp Structure for a Personal Use: Habit or Workout Tracking

In this video, we're going to be talking about how you can build a personal habit tracker in ClickUp. Now, I'm talking about personal habits here, but I want to be clear that this kind of structure could apply to tracking your workouts, tracking your home routines, tracking your mantras, creating a personal journal. This particular question is answering someone who's switching from notion to ClickUp. So if you're kind of making a similar move trying to organize your personal productivity in ClickUp, definitely watch this whole video. This is a clip from a much broader conversation that I've had with our clicking up community members who are able to ask questions every single week, which I answer live, much like what you're seeing here. So if you're interested in asking your own question, of course put them in the comments below. But also consider joining ClickingUp to be a part of this conversation every single week. I'll put the link to clickingup in the description below. But without further ado, let's get to the answer to today's question. How would you build a habit tracker in ClickUp? So I actually built out two possibilities here, and if this is something people are interested in, please let me know. Right now I'm planning on doing like a personal use of ClickUp Deep dive, I think around the turn of the new year, around January, when we have some personal revolution resolutions. Thank you, Layla. To track. But for now I just built out two very basic examples of how you can build out a habit tracker. How you would build it is going to depend greatly on how exactly you are, what exactly you are tracking, how are you tracking things. So here's one example here. The first one is what I would call like a binary habit tracker. Is it done or is it not done? Not exactly binary because I have three options here but but drink three liters of water, walk dog run five, you know, whatever it is. I have kind of a stage over here whether how good did I do on that? And when I'm done, when I've, you know, when the day is over, I'm going to have it mark complete. Now I can have it automatically mark complete when every day happens and then I can have the automation create a new task each day. Whether I manually mark it complete or don't mark it complete. The main logic of this one is show closed. Man, everything is crazy today. Crazy bugs in ClickUp today. Let's see if it'll show close now. Okay, that's fine. I didn't want it when closed anyway. I was just testing you anyway. What this Is doing is it's giving us kind of a yes, no, is it done? Is it not done? And we're having tracking of the habits happening through a custom field. Kind of how well we did. Where this is not so good is the fact that we kind of have a hard time seeing the historical trends of this. So yes, we could have things recur by creating a new task each time. And we could kind of see like run five miles, red, red, red, red, green, green. You know, we could see it visually. This isn't giving us a good kind of report. We could kind of create some dashboards based on this, but this is all we've got. We got a list for our habits and they'd be individual tasks for each step. Now, I've also created this other example, very similar where it has today's daily habits and it has all of our kind of things as subtasks. For myself, kind of my daily habits, I often do end up using a subtask structure like this one where it recurs every day and there's no actual due dates for the subtasks. It's just the overall day, you know, repeats every single day. Again, you don't have a good reporting on this. It's not a really visual, nice way to see it. Although you can use list View to kind of. Pardon me, we can use listview to kind of see an overall kind of how we did on that day kind of thing going on here. That progress is not going to tell us much with these guys. So we could create some dashboards based on this custom field, but it's not the best, however. This is like a Did I do it? Did I not do it? The reminder of what you need to do each day, especially if you're using time blocking and stuff like this, this could be a nice way to use it. I've definitely seen people who use this for like recurring tasks. Email. Check your email each day. You know, if they're time blocking and using ClickUp to help block off that time on their schedule, this is probably the way you would do it. So you would create that block, have the recurrence for when you want that time block to happen, whether it's your A week, your B week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, whatever that might be. And then have your calendar integrated with ClickUp. So this pops up in ClickUp and vice versa. So this would be kind of the more basic way to track habits. The other way would be to track actual data in ClickUp. Quick aside here. If you're enjoying this video, go ahead and give it a thumbs up and click subscribe. While you are at it, every single Wednesday and Friday, I am back with videos like this, talking about ClickUp, how to use it in a more intelligent way to get to build your business instruction manual. So take a second, click the button. All right, let's get back to the video. And you can see, overall, this looks pretty darn similar, except we kind of flipped the axis in some ways. Rather than having. Rather than having each thing we're tracking on the left side almost as our kind of our X axis, we have it going across our Y in the sense of flip that. But we have it going off in custom fields. So our custom fields are telling us our. Our pieces of data we want to track. So the liters of water, we had five liters of water. Miles ran. We ran 50 miles. Walk the dog or not stretch or not mood. We could add some different things here. We could go through and we could complete our kind of daily journal or habit tracking this way. Now where this is slightly nicer is you can now create, you know, some baby reports. We can have kind of our range, our average or stuff like that. We can do the basic things you can typically do with custom field calculations here. We could create a formula field tracking. You know, I don't know why you'd want to do that, but maybe our miles ran per liter of water we had or something like that. We can do all of that stuff because we're grouping each day's daily habits as a row using a task for each day. Now the title of these tasks becomes very boring, basically because we just have daily habit tracker, tracker blank. We could put the date in each of these. One thing I've seen people do is they actually create an Excel spreadsheet. I've done this where you have an Excel spreadsheet, use the ED function. Edate function to create one month later or one week later, one day later. And you just go ahead and you drag down that entire column and paste that full column of data into ClickUp, effectively creating. And I see if I can do an example here. So imagine we have a whole column of Data. I'm using ClickUp for this. But imagine we were using a spreadsheet. We had, you know, four, four pieces of data in a spreadsheet. We pasted them in here. It'll detect all of those lines. So in that way you could create daily habit tracker and you could create the date after it and paste those in here so you have a prompt for every single day of the week. Um, that's when I. When I schedule my office hours. I actually did that when I created all the tasks for each office hour in my own ClickUp. I created office hours. I used a click, an Excel function with the. And sign and the, you know, the quotes around it. And I created office hours this date seven days later. Office hours this date seven days later. And I pasted it in to make sure I could have a clear task for each date rather than seeing all of them with the same note name. That was an aside. I'm sorry for the tangent. You'll see here I have the due date, which would be the end of the day, presumably on each day, and the date closed just as a point of data. Did I finish that tracker on the day? Did I do it a few days later? You could choose to hide that. And this would be where I would add all of my fields. So I would kind of go through and track whatever I wanted to. I do not know the limit of custom fields horizontally. I did actually contact. Actually we. Jen contacted ClickUp and we did confirm that in terms of actual custom field fields, vertically, there's not supposedly a limit in terms of how many options you have here. But, you know, we'll see if that's true because I'm sure it'll slow down significantly over a certain number. But I would go in and add a lot of these. Your reporting here is very limited, which is a real downside of this. But, you know, it does give you some good amount of information. So we could go in here to Board View. We could look at, you know, days grouped by weather or not, days by mood even. And we can make sure that all of our cards had our, you know, see how mood correlates to whether we stretched pieces like that. I've also seen folks using this also create a dropdown for day of the week if they wanted to group by that seems a little redundant to me. But you could go ahead and create a dropdown for day of the week. Yeah. And this becomes your recurring task. This is probably how I would do it. I would say I've also built out a personal journal in this method because you really can add a lot of details. The downside of this method versus using notion is with ClickUp. And this goes back to my automating actions versus automating instructions video in clicking up. But in ClickUp, all of your tasks have a lot of extra stuff being tracked. Like you have this description, you have this thing, you have subtasks. It's a lot of data that ClickUp is attaching to every task you create. And when you create tasks that aren't really tasks, like in this case, this is more of a journal entry. You're bringing a lot of extra data with it. You're able to track time and track Sprint points and all this other stuff. So things can get slower here than they would in notion. Although Notion also tracks a lot of other things. You're also not able to report on this. So if I were to create a daily habit tracker just like this with all of these fields, but in a spreadsheet like a Google sheet that I had embedded, I would be able to run different reports. I could create a pivot chart, a pivot table, really analyze my information to see how liters of water correlates to mood, which correlates to miles run. Like I could do a whole statistical analysis of my habit tracker, which you cannot do in ClickUp. So that's the major downside of using ClickUp for data tracking is it's not a database. It's really built for tasks. However, I think this could work. What I would probably do is rather than having and notes custom field here, I probably have a journal. I might have my prompts in here. So if I had they say gratitude, have your whole gratitude prompt. Today was great because you know that kind of thing goals. You don't have great visibility of reporting based on these description fields. It would be fantastic to see a standard field appear for description. Not the case yet, but I would probably use that description area to give myself a little bit more context. However, this is probably how I would build a habit tracker in ClickUp. Same answer. If someone was asking me for a personal journal or daily kind of daily mantra, daily motivation stuff, this is probably how I would do it. I would do a task per day, although I showed you that other option around just binaries. This would probably be better for things like things that you actually want on your calendar, in my view. I'm sorry, that was long winded. Hopefully this was helpful to you. Let me know if you have any additional questions about how to build a habit tracker. Because like I said, there's been a few questions coming in for personal use of ClickUp and it's making me think it should get more coverage. But it's not like a ton of interest yet. So I'm not sure if it's a good use of our time yet. So let me know. So that's my two cents. That would be kind of my rough draft of how to build out a habit tracker and ClickUp if you have your own $0.02 if you've been building a habit tracker for a while, if you figured out some things that work or don't work, please use the comments in this video to share your tips. And of course, if you are looking to learn, click up faster adapted to your use case with feedback from, you know, live humans. Consider joining, clicking up, swapping notes with peers who are also going through the same journey and getting my help on your specific ClickUp structure. But until next time, thank you guys so much for watching and enjoy the process.