ClickUp Time Tracking Best Practices

Do you want to know just how profitable your business is? Or maybe you want to know where your team is spending the bulk of their time? Or maybe you just need to make sure that your clients are properly invoiced. Time tracking is extremely important for teams trying to gather this data and thankfully we can do all of this inside of ClickUp. However, to get this accurate data and information, you need to make sure that ClickUp is properly set up. So in this video, I'm going to be walking you through all of the ClickUp time tracking best practices, including one, how you can actually track your time to how the ClickUp hierarchy works with time tracking, and then three, we're going to look at some dashboards so you can start to visualize this information. All right, so let's jump into ClickUp here and talk about how we can actually track time inside of ClickUp. So if you know this and you want to skip to the next part where we actually go over sort of how the hierarchy works with time tracking, feel free to do that. I'm going to go over sort of the beginners part of this and then we'll jump forward into more information for more advanced users inside of ClickUp. So first of all, what you need to do first to actually track time in ClickUp is to go to your clickapps if it's not turned on quite yet. If you don't see a time tracker anywhere inside of ClickUp. If you go to a task and you don't see a place to track your time, that's probably because that ClickApp is not turned on. So ClickApps inside of ClickUp are basically advanced features and functionalities that you can turn on inside of ClickUp within some of your spaces or across your whole workspace. So if I come here to my Quick Action toolbar, I can come to click apps just like this. That's going to open up my settings and show me all the click apps that I have available. So again, if you don't know what these are, I have other sort of tutorial videos that I can link in the description below for you to watch that. But in this case, what you need to make sure you do is just go type in time tracking just like this and you'll find your time tracking click apps. You want to make sure that's turned on again, make sure it's turned on across your spaces as well, because this can turn be turned on for a certain space and be turned off for other spaces. So just make sure that it's turned on for all of yours. That'll make it a little bit easier. So you also see time tracking roll up as well. Basically, that's going to take your subtasks that are time is tracked on and move that to the parent task so you could see it there across your whole sort of workflow that way. So again, make sure that time tracking is turned on. I also would recommend that time estimates as well are turned on, just because it's helpful to see time estimates first time tracked inside of your workspace as well. And this is going to help with your workload view too. So again, make sure those click apps are turned on and then you'll be good to go. So that's the first step. Now let's talk about where we can actually go and track our time for everyone. That's inside of clickups, there's a bunch of different options that you can do. One of them that I typically use is just within my view. So I create a view which is called my. My task view. Essentially what this does is it's going to filter all of my tasks. This is built at the everything level. It's pretty similar to your home view that you have here inside of ClickUp. But essentially all I need to do is just make sure that I have a column here time tracked just like this show and hide, which it's already shown, as you'll see here. Just like that, I can unshow it or I can hide it. And then if I want to bring it back just like this, let's go to time tracked just like that. And that will bring it back up. So that's the easiest way for me to do it. I can just basically come here. This is my task, I'm assigned to it. This is when it's due. I have my time estimate on there as well. And I can just go and start the timer just like that. So very easy. Again in the view. This is going to give me sort of a good overview of all of my tasks, as well as a place for me to track my time. So that's kind of the simplest way that you could do it for your team. In addition, I also have the ability, if I'm in a task, I can also see it right here. I can start the timer just like that. So a few different options, whether you're in a task or just in a view, you could start the timer. It's not that difficult. In addition, if I wanted to, I can also go to my Quick Action toolbar over here. And as you'll see, I have the ability to track time. I can also pin that to the top of my toolbar. And now I'm able to go here to track time again. I'm going to have to find that task. This way we'll see some tasks that have recently been viewed there. I can also see reporting in a time tracking dashboard if I want to, but this is not going to be as easy. I don't typically use this. I'm just looking at my tasks here and tracking time this way as opposed to using your Quick Action toolbar up here. But really however you want to, you could track time. Just make sure that that time gets associated with the correct task and location that it should be a part of, because that's what's going to help with reporting and visibility in the future. In addition, in the future they've ClickUp. ClickUp has talked about adding a timesheets feature as well. So when I'm recording this video, it's not quite here, but there will be timesheets in the future for you to be able to track time that way. However, after now that we've talked about where we can actually track our time, let's go into the three different ways that you can track time. So as you'll see here, if I go it was at the Quick Action toolbar, but let's go in here into our view and we'll see time tracked. So as you'll see, I have the option to either do a timer, which is probably going to be the most accurate if you actually start and stop your timer at the correct time. So I can use a timer. All I need to do is go and start the timer just like this and it's going to start to add time to this specific task that I'm working on. So I have to track your time and how we're going to track time. As I mentioned earlier as well, you want to make this as easy for your team as possible. That's how you're going to get good data out of the system. And to do that I always recommend, as I am in here, I have a my task view. Essentially what this is. It's just a view at the everything level so that I can see work across my whole workspace. I'm basically using a filter where all the assignee is me. So that's just filtering all of my work to this place. I can also do subtasks as separate tasks and you'll see a little bit more in these, this sort of view and sort of this methodology in my other videos as well, especially one that I have, which I'll pop up in the top right corner here in the description below about creating templates for your ClickUp workspace, which is very helpful and can make all this a lot easier for you. But basically what you need here is you just need to make sure again the tasks are here. I have my assignee, my due date priority, if you like to use those priority flags, time estimates and always make sure that the time tracked column is there as well. So you want to make sure you have a view just like this for everyone on your team. This can be a private view for everyone. Just, just make sure they have all the data they need in here so that time tracking is very easy for them so that they don't have to go and find a place to track time. It's just all right there with their task view. The easier you can make it for your team, the more they're going to adopt this and actually start to track time inside of ClickUp, which you need to make good data driven decisions. So that's the first part of this video. Now jumping into how we can actually use the hierarchy to our advantage to make sure that our time gets tracked for the create space, the create locations. Because the hierarchy plays well with time tracking. This is super, super important for anyone, especially those that are in client services. If you want to know where your team's spending your time, if you want to be able to invoice your clients accurately, you need to make sure that your hierarchy is set up correctly. So the way that I like to do this, especially for agencies or anyone in client services, we like to have a few distinct spaces. So we have operations delivering growth. You'll see. I also have a CRM and process library in here. I'm not going to talk about those in this video but, but we have other videos that'll talk about this. However. Operations delivering growth. Those are my three main spaces. The three main sort of teams are departments within my business. Growth is going to be for my sales and marketing work. As you can see here I have a marketing and sales folder. Delivery is going to be for all my client services. As you can see, I have all of my clients here as folders which we'll get into a lot more in a second. And then operations is basically going to be for everything else for hr, for finance and things, things like that. That's sort of where everything else is going to live. So again, if I want to know where I'm spending time on my business growth, delivery and operations, I need to make sure I have spaces for each of those and the work that's associated with those goes into those spaces. So again, high level, our spaces are the highest level in the ClickUp hierarchy. Those are going to be our teams. Now our folders are going to be sort of departments within that teams, as you can see, growth, marketing and sales. So if I want to see how much time is associated with marketing for sales, I need to make sure I have those folders here. But the most important piece, especially for client services here, is going to be the folders for your client, because I need to make sure that all the work for Shruit Farms, who's one of our clients, gets associated with Shrut Farms. So in that case, I need to have a folder for Shrut Farms where all the work will then live. So that's going to be the main example. Again, delivery space. My folders for each of my clients or the folders like this become smaller departments for not client services. So in addition to that, you have your spaces, you have your folders, and then you also have your lists. So my list in here, as you see, I have Shrut Farms, I then have a retainer list. So basically this can be a project that we're doing. If that's a separate billable item, maybe it's a website project, or I can use a list for a retainer or a contract that we're doing for Shrut Farm. So basically, if you need to put all of your billable work in one spot, you need to make sure that you have a list just like that. That way, each month, when I'm billing my client, or if they have a certain amount of hours that we're giving them, or points, whatever it may be, all that's going to be built into this one list right here. So retainer through Farms, essentially all of this for Shrewd Farms, for that contract is going to live right here, all the tasks, all the work. Because what that does now is anytime I track time on any of these tasks just like this, that time will be associated with this retainer, with Shrut Farms and with delivery. So then when I go into my dashboards, which I'll show you in a second, essentially what I'm able to do then is I'm able to see how much work do we track in delivery, how much work then do we track for Shruit Farms, and how much work did we track for this retainer or this contract or this project, however you want that to be listed out. So that's the best way that you could set up your ClickUp workspace. So to be able to get that data and that information, as you can see in here as well, I'm also breaking this into parent tasks and subtasks. The way that I have my parent tasks are essentially a deliverable that I'm doing for Shrut Farms. So we have a meta campaign and then all the subtasks are going to be the action steps to complete that deliverable. Now what you'll see is when I do go to track time on each of these subtasks, which this is where the work is actually going to be assigned out. I myself, as you can see, I have this as my task. I will track time on this subtask that will be associated with the task that I'm actually working on. That way I get sort of the finer details of what we're actually working on. So as you can see, things like this, proofing, revised ads, completing content edits. When I have those individual tasks and time is attracted track to those tasks, that then tells me what did we work on? Maybe where were their differences versus the time estimates for time tracked. So, so that's going to get me more of the granular detail as well as past work back and forth. And then in addition, all of this time that's tracked on these subtasks will roll up to see how much time it actually spent us we took to finish this meta campaign for Shrug Farm. So again, based off how you build your hierarchy, the data that I'm now going to get is how long did I spend on each of these individual tasks, how long did we spend on this meta campaign, how long did we spend inside of our retainer, how long did we spend in Shruit Farms overall? If maybe we have a retainer and a separate project, we want to be able to see that. And then how long did we spend in delivery across all of our clients as well? And then how long do we spend on all these different teams? So growth delivery and operations, where did the time go this past month, this past year, or whatever time slot you're looking at. So that's kind of a great way to build your ClickUp hierarchy so that it's going to help you with time tracking to see how profitable you are, where you're spending your time, as well as how you can invoice your clients for specific contracts, for deliverables, for projects, or however you're invoicing your clients like that. And the last thing to discuss here is, as I mentioned before, when you do track Time you have the ability to say something is billable or not billable. Again, it might be hard for your team unless you have really good training, unless you really hold your team accountable, which it is possible for them to all always click billable when it's a billable item. However, in some cases the reason we build this delivery space again, this is going to help with views and dashboards and things like that as well as keep all that work in one spot. But this means with delivery, we're just assuming all of this work is deliverable so or billable. So that means essentially with shrut farms, all of the work that's happening in this folder is going to be billable to shrup farms. That way I just can assume I don't need to turn on that billable option. It's just going to be billable to shrut farms. So that's one way of looking at it. Again, if you want to, you can use that billable option if you have billable versus non billable work that's happening in your delivery space. But oftentimes this is the easiest way of doing it. Sometimes you can use separate lists to kind of help with that. But again, easiest way most simple for your team is to just say, hey, don't worry about that billable option. All the work that you're tracking the delivery space is going to be billable for those certain clients. So that's again how we organize our ClickUp workspace. The last thing to talk about is actual dashboards here inside of ClickUp that you can use. So if I come here, I have a time reporting dashboard that we've created the cards that you're going to be using in these. As you'll see, it's pretty obvious we have time tracking, so you have time reporting. You also have time sheets that are available in here. And the way that this works is each of these cards will have separate filters and settings that can be adjusted. So as you'll see here, I can come to my timer time by client and contract card and I can come here, it has its own settings. I can set up a range for what I'm trying to look at. So whether you're trying to look at a whole year, whether you're trying to look at just a month, a week, a day, or a certain range, you have a lot of options to adjust that. And again, that's going to be where the time was actually tracked. So remember, I can change that date to January 2nd if I need to, even if it is January 3rd, you have the option. So all this time is going to be based off of when the time was actually tracked like that. So those are your options here. In addition, you can also filter this down using things like custom fields, using locations, we can show our time estimates, we can include archive tasks, include subtasks, which you'll want to if you're working out of subtasks. And then you can also show billable and non billable in one place. So you have a lot of different options here. You'll notice the one thing, maybe the one downside to some of these cards is that you only have the option here. And this is why I have multiple cards listed out here. I only have the option to choose two different groupings. So I can only do folder and list. I can only do space or list. I can only do space and user. I only have two different levels that I can choose from. And that's why I'm utilizing multiple cards here to kind of show data in multiple levels. So as you can see here, I'm able to see time by client and contract. So we see Athlete Shrut Farms, Advanced Refrigeration, surrounding by Jam and Dunder Mifflin. I can sort of see the estimated versus track time within a given time range. So that's why I have this separated out by these folders is because now we'll see how much time we actually tracked for Dunder Mifflin across this certain range. In addition, now I can drop down and sort of see the retainer or the contract and this is basically the list. So if it was a project, if it's just a contract or something else, now I can see how much time was associated with that list for Dunder Mifflin within this time range as well. So again, that's why you want to have those different levels in the hierarchy and keep it organized. The task location really matters because that time will be associated with this retainer and Dun Mifflin and then delivery as we talked about earlier. In addition, if I just wanted to see it based off of, as you can see here, dunmif1retainer DM that's also showing up here. Now I'm looking at the list being the highest level within this card. I can go here. We'll see retainer dm drop this down and now I can see who actually tracked that time. So as you can see, I'm the one that tracked the time. If you have multiple people, you'll be able to see that here as well. But this is just kind of another level for Me to look at who is the one that tracked the time associated with what contract or project, which list. Basically. In addition, here we have time by space and user. So now I'm looking at just the space. We can see where we track the delivery and then we'll see who was the person that tracked all of that time. So again, you have multiple levels that you can kind of set up here based off of what you need to see. So we have our delivery space. Who tracked all that time? It was me there. But as you have more people track time, you'll see all of that in here and see where all the time has gone. So you have a lot of different options. In addition, you have timesheets to sort of see who was tracking time on which day and then you can pull down details to see those actual tasks on these timesheets as well. And all of these again have their own ranges, own settings and filters that can be turned on or off depending on what you're trying to look at. So a lot of different features that you can use inside of ClickUp to really get the time reporting and dashboards that you need. In addition, once you start to get to the more advanced levels and you actually start to incorporate more custom fields and other things into your time reports, you can also pull this information out into something like a Power BI dashboard, which is something that we offer all of our clients that allow you to sort of see again which were the work categories. So if I use a custom field on all of those tasks that shows me the work categories. I can kind of see how much time do we spend in software development, internal systems, website development, team management, strategy, so on and so forth. We can see planned hours by worked and then we can just get an overview of time visibility as well, how much we have available across all of our team in terms of their capacities, how much was estimated, how much was tracked per month per space, and so on and so forth. So a lot of good data that we could pull out of this. Again, it really all depends on on how you set up your ClickUp workspace. So make sure again you get the good proper structure in terms of your spaces being sort of those high level teams across your organization. Then we go into those small, smaller level departments for, for growth or operations. We can look at marketing versus sales. And then in delivery, if you are client services, you want to make sure all of those folders represent your clients with lists under that being sort of your contracts, those retainers, or those projects or however you bill your clients is going to be the most helpful. And there you have it. Those are your best practices for tracking time inside of ClickUp. And if you like this video, please go ahead and hit subscribe. We're going to continue to deliver content weekly for teams trying to get the most out of ClickUp. Or if you're ready to completely transform your operations with the help of ClickUp's first ever and highest rated solutions partner, go to zenpower.com call and book a call with one of our experts at ZenPot. We've helped close to 3,000 different teams across the globe build more productive, profitable and healthy teams by streamlining their operations and ClickUp. So whether you're trying to just increase productivity, increase profitability, improve team health, get an accurate view of workload, or build a system that runs without you so that you can finally go on that well deserved vacation, we are here to help. Taking your operations seriously will change your life and I want you to experience this life changing impact. I'll see you again next time.

Can I make no more I can't replace it Trying hard just not to waste it it's about time yeah, it's about time by time.