ClickUp Time Tracker: 2 Ways to Make it EASIER to do!

Time tracking. It's the thing that we're all supposed to do, but we do a terrible job of it. Right now I am forgetting to time track as I am recording this video. It happens to the best of us, but there are a few things we can do to make life a little bit easier when it comes to time tracking. Specifically when we are using the ClickUp time tracker. So I'm going to flip over my screen here and share some of the tips that I was just sharing with my team recently about how we can track our time more effectively in ClickUp. And before I flip over to that, if you're new here, be sure to subscribe. If you are interested in tips about ClickUp, please process building systems in your business and other things around how technology can make your business work a little bit more on autopilot so you're not feeling like you're running your business out of your memory. All right, enough about me. Let's flip over to this tutorial. Okay, so here we are in ClickUp and I'm going to just show you a few of the tips that I like to use around Time tracking and ClickUp. First thing first, figure out how detailed you want to be. So for me, I like to use I have a task per client layout in my own ClickUp and what I like to use is code names. So you'll notice or I try my best. At least hopefully you notice that I try not to show any sensitive client information or really any information that is not mine to share in my videos. Now I know I've made mistakes in that in the past. I try my best. I don't always catch everything, but one easy way to do that, since I'm doing a lot of tutorials, is just to be safe. I always give every client in my layout or in my systems a three digit or three letter code. So it's a client code and internally we always know which client is which. But these three letter codes just help me kind of see at a glance what's going on without having all of that client information exposed. That's kind of a privacy thing. But how that helps with time tracking is as follows. So I'm usually not time tracking on the specific task. Of course I could go in here and click Time track. That is inconvenient to me and I don't really like doing it. Instead, I'm usually up here living in the ClickUp extension. And when I'm up in the extension and I'm looking to track time, one of the easiest ways to do that to me is to have to type as little as possible. So if I was here, and I know I'm working on Hair by Claire Underwood here, I can type in that code. And it's a lot faster than having to type hair and seeing all the different things that show up. In this case, there's a lot of things that seem to contain those words. So by having a code, that's kind of a weird thing that you wouldn't have, in other words, it's a lot easier to locate what you should be tracking time on. In this case, it's tracking client time. The other tip I have around this, and this is kind of a big one here, is having general time tracking categories. So you see, I've set this up even in this demo area here, just for the sake of explanation. Here we have this list called General time Tracking. In my own space, I generally keep this under an HR area or an admin area. And it is one list where every single task begins with time. And these tasks are never truly complete, even when they're closed. Make sure that they are shown. And all these tasks are. Is kind of a dumping area for time that doesn't really seem like it belongs anywhere. So I could add these two categories in. In our own ClickUp space, we kind of have something like this. And it's very clear that you need to explain what this is for. This is not the place to track all of your time. Right. We don't want to track everything here. We want to track it on the specific task. But. But certain things like email or being on a YouTube or checking your finances or sales activity, it can be difficult to track that to a specific task or a specific person or a specific. You know, you're not going to create a task for every day saying check YouTube, although maybe you would. I don't like that. I just check it when I want to check it. But to track my time better on that, I like to use these general time codes. So that way when I'm up here in my time tracking, choose a task to start tracking time. Just like with the client names, I can type in a code space line there. And it brings all my time categories up to the very top. So I could click on here and just start tracking time for sales. You'll notice one other thing when it comes to this time tracking is when you're tracking time, your most recent tasks always show up at the top. And I think this makes it really easy for task switching. One of the things that I had my team actually really? They asked about. They were concerned about was around. Oh, man. But what if I'm switching from client to client? Sometimes we're doing client support, so it takes just a few minutes per task and then you're switching onto something else. How do I go through and track all the things I need to track? Do I have to flip back and forth between clients every five minutes? That's going to take forever. Well, my response to them is, what I'm going to tell you now is when you track time, you'll actually see these recent tasks. And when all of these are codes and you're working on, say, 10 active clients at a time, well, it can be really nice to flip back and forth. All right, we've got a few minutes working on Crack of Dawn. We've got a few minutes working on Hair. Hair by Claire. Like, it'll flip through them very quickly when you're using these recent tasks. And it'll allow you to switch between your top. I don't know how many we have here. Is that 8? 9? I mean, it'll let you flip through all of these tasks pretty quickly. And if you're working on more than nine things a day, well, maybe you're a little bit too distracted. Or maybe that kind of task should be grouped into this time area. The reason we track time is because as a service business, the main cost we have is labor. So if we don't track that, we're like a steakhouse that doesn't track the cost of meat. Like, what are we doing? So tracking time is super important. Finding a way that works for you is really important. And these little time things can help make it so it doesn't feel like it needs to be super granular. You don't need to have an email task due every day to remind you to check your email and track your time for it. You can, but it seems like overkill for most of us. So this is the time tracker. Since time tracking did release a new version, I'll also call out that down here in the corner, you can continue these time tracking things. Oops, sorry about that. So we can go here and start time tracking as well. If you'd rather not use the extension. I like the extension. I think it's pretty convenient. But this gives you more or less the same thing, just less options. So this will show you your top five versus your top nine. I like to have more recent tasks up there, so I still use the extension at this point. In this time tracking area, you can choose to track additional attributes like whether it's build and whether you'd like to label it with a certain label. I'm not using any of these internally right now. They seem like they're not really doing a lot for me, so I haven't made the case for them. And if you are a simple business looking to just get started on time tracking, I would probably discourage you from getting into the weeds of these two pieces as well. Unless you really, really need to bill Because I think this billing is going to be feeding into the invoicing feature that's coming out in ClickUp, but it's not here yet and you can always start switching to it after you get the basics down. If you're looking to start somewhere, make sure everyone on your team has the time tracking extension on. Make sure you have your Qlik app for time tracking turned on so you're able to do it. I'll link around here to my video talking about how to set up this Chrome extension for time tracking properly. Get started by having people track time on the tasks that they're working on. If they're common tasks like clients, make sure that they have code names so you can very easily type them in and get right to them without having to search through a bunch of things that have similar names. Because this search isn't the best. And if you are looking for general time tracking things that aren't, you know, things that are between the cracks, the water cooler Time Creating a header like time with unique spacing around it so that nothing else shows up will be really nice to be able to help you focus in on the stuff that you're actually focused on. So that's my quick tips around time tracking in ClickUp. This is a quick and actionable video. If you have any thoughts or questions around this, please do leave a comment. I'll be doing more of a deep dive deep dive on the new version of time tracking soon, but since it's not super functional yet, I figure we can hold off a little bit. So I'll see you guys in the comments. Have a good one. Thanks for watching. If you are tired of trying to piece together YouTube videos to figure out how to align your workflows, your processes, and your ClickUp account, well, maybe it's time that we talk. I work one on one with a select group of clients every quarter to help people build out their systems and processes. Find out more at ProcessDriven code.