ClickUp to Manage Goals, OKRs, or Rocks (EASILY)

If you've been playing around with ClickUp, odds are you have discovered the goals feature, which is this guy here where you can actually create different goals and folders and track your performance related to those targets or goals inside of ClickUp itself. For many of us though, that goals feature is a little bit clunky. It's kind of out of the way and it can be difficult to make a daily habit of checking those goals because it is kind of tucked away in this corner of ClickUp itself. So that's why I prefer to use a task based method for tracking okrs or goals inside of ClickUp. Later in this video, I'm going to take you inside of ClickUp and show you how exactly we have it set up and how I actually use it for my own business. But first I want to explain what OKRs are because it kind of doesn't roll off the tongue and if you're not familiar with it, it may just sound like a jargony way to say goals, which it kind of is. Basically, okrs are referring to objectives and key results. It's a goal setting framework. And objectives in many ways is kind of like a goal and a key result. Here is a measurement of your progress towards an objective. So this is where we kind of get into the smart goal thinking, where we have specific, quantifiable, achievable, objective and challenging. So in theory, if you are crushing those key results, you are going to accomplish your objective. Now, one layer down from okr, Right. Objectives and key results are tasks and these are the tactics and actions you're going to do to achieve the key results which will in turn help you achieve the objective. Okay, so we got kind of three layers. So this conveniently does line up with the ClickUp hierarchy. Now that there are three layers available and then some of the. And prior to ClickUp releasing the nested subtask feature, which allow you to have more layers of subtasks below, I kind of had a workaround to create goals in ClickUp where I just simply put them in a dashboard using tags and mentions in a text widget. Actually talk about that here in this dashboard video. So if you haven't watched that, maybe check that out as a more basic way to do what I'm about to show you here. So let's go into ClickUp and I'll actually show you what I have set up here. So here in ClickUp you can actually see that we have a list called business okrs. It's a template. Yeah. And we have a list information Just to help us understand what each level of the hierarchy is going to equate to. But if I scroll down, you can kind of see how this comes together. So I'm just going to collapse some of these so it's not quite so cluttered. We have a big picture theme or rocks. I've kind of added one layer up. We have an objective, we have our key result, and then we have our tactics. It's pretty much it. This is how I have it set up in ClickUp. So we have kind of the due date relating to a quarter for me, or it could be a year if you have a yearly theme. I just like to have these connected in this kind of way instead of having a custom field, although you could certainly do that too. We have our objectives, like I said, key results and so on. I did create a type custom field. This is kind of inspired by Vincent at ClickUp. He did a tutorial talking about how he has his okrs or his goals set up and he used these symbols and I thought that was a fun way to do it. In theory, these will eventually just become item types. ClickUp is moving towards a space where tasks aren't always going to be tasks. And if that's a new concept for you, maybe check out the level up recap I did where I talked about ClickUp's 2021 roadmap and my interpretation of it. But anyway, these icons at this point are independent of the tasks themselves, but they more or less equate to that where the task is in the hierarchy. It's a little repetitive, but I thought it was cute, so I kept it. So you can imagine replacing this information with your own structure by having your theme or your rock here, objective key result, just by renaming these tasks or putting them in the task description itself. Now, one thing I have played with here that I want to just share to get your gears kind of turning as well is at the third level of subtask or the fourth indent here I do have my tactic directly inside the same list. And if you have a larger team or you have big objectives you're planning, having all of your tactics on one list might become kind of insane, because maybe every single task in your organization is linking back to these key results. So if that's the case for you, what I would encourage you to do is instead get rid of that fourth layer or that third subtask layer and instead use a relationship custom field, which I know people have been asking me to do more tutorials on this. So here you go. Relationships in ClickUp are kind of like relationships in notion. It's relating one series of data with another series of data. So here you can actually see that I can add a task instead of just a regular dropdown, and that task would then show up kind of like this one. So you can see here, this is an actual task in our ClickUp workspace right now that we now have related to the key result. And this task itself is located in a totally different area. It's over in, say, the marketing or the operations area. But we're able to relate it here, so that way we can see it all in one place. And so with this kind of structure, rather than having all of your tactics be actually on this list, you can have this be the master resource that you are linking to from throughout your area. Maybe you even have a requirement for yourself that every improvement task you have or every new project you you have needs to be able to relate back to these key results or these objectives. And once you make that requirement and that relationship is started, you'll be able to see them all here, but not actually have to have those tasks here. This would be a great way for me to visualize and say, okay, key result one, we have one task that we're really working on to get me closer to that goal. But key result number two, we really don't have anything here. Oh, no. Okay. And this would help me kind of gauge how far we're working towards a goal, especially if this one has 15 different tasks and this has one. I probably want to know that Also in this template, you'll see that I have a next 30 days by owner I, a chat area and a progress activity view all baked into this. Just because I feel like that would make it really helpful for someone actually using this OKR template. Now, if you want to learn more information about the relationship feature that I was talking about, I actually did a video about a CRM build out, which I know doesn't sound related, but it actually used the relationship feature and it went through a bit of a crash course on how to understand the fundamentals of using relationships and rollups and clickups. You can check out that video here. If that piece of the equation was maybe a little over your head at this point, but otherwise this is a relatively simple setup. If you skip the relationship feature, this is something I think anybody could set up. Now, just a reminder, if this is not working for you or you're not able to make this many layers of subtasks, just make sure that you have the click app called Nested Subtasks on. You can find this in your settings as long as you're an admin in your workspace. Otherwise, there you go. That is how you can use an OKR setup by using tasks in ClickUp rather than having to manually type something into a doc or a dashboard which I have talked about in my dashboard video, or having to use the actual goals feature, which at this point are a little bit clunky and are probably going to be deprecating in the future. If this video was helpful for you, you can help me out by giving this video a thumbs up and leaving a comment below. That kind of engagement helps this video reach more people in the YouTube algorithm, and it costs you nothing, so why not? But otherwise, thank you so much for joining me. I'll see you guys back here for another video talking about how to use ClickUp and your processes hand in hand. Until next time. Enjoy the process. Oh, and by the way, if you like this video, you're probably going to like this one next about personal productivity and ClickUp. It gets quite into the weeds as to how I actually organize my own personal workflows inside ClickUp. Sam.