Design Business Systems | Conditional processes in ClickUp

So today I'm actually going to be starting with a conversation that I just had actually earlier this morning about conditional processes. And I promise this is all gonna. I hope it's all gonna make sense in the end. But what we're gonna be talking about today is how if you have a process that has a fork in the road, you can go in multiple different directions with it, or maybe it involves multiple tools, or maybe half sync ClickUp, half somewhere else, how can you just think about the best way to approach that? What are the steps you need to take in order to turn that process, which involves many different turns and twists into something you can then implement in ClickUp or in other tools that you use? So here we are in, in a process map, if you will, and we've got a drawing here of two different ways you might be mapping your process. It could be a flowchart, which you see is what typically I'm doing on here, or it might be a document where you have like a 3A or 3B or a optional or a, if this, then that. And when you have a process with a fork in the road, as we see kind of here, it can be confusing to figure out how exactly that translates into the tools you're using. Most of you I know are using ClickUp, but even if you're using Asana or any other tool, unless you've got a workflow visualizer like you might have in a email marketing tool or a CRM where you can actually visually see the fork in the road, and it can be confusing to know where to go from here. So the first thing I want to say on this is, before you do anything, you need to get it out of your head. So don't get paralyzed by the fact that your process has conditions. Get it out of your head by drawing out the entire process. So that means going in here and continuing to draw the entire flowchart of what happens next after each step of the journey? And once you do that, then start worrying about this. So often I'm talking to people who, they have a process that has conditions, and they're so paralyzed by the fear of I don't know what to do with it, that they don't even start writing it down. I hate to break it to you, but despite what the tech companies want to tell us, I would 80, maybe 90% of the benefit of having processes, you know, out of your head and templated is actually just the process of getting them out of your head, writing them down somewhere. Doesn't matter if you don't even use ClickUp or use any fancy tool. Sorry, Process Street A. Just having a piece of paper. I feel like I need a visual aid here. Just having a piece of paper that shows each step that is giving you such a jump in productivity versus having it all in your head and trying to remember what comes next. Yeah, that's my first soapbox. I'm going to get on and off as is. If you have conditional software, if you have conditional processes, go ahead and get them out of your head. We can take these and put them into a bunch of different places. For the question that just came in about what software I'm using to share my screen, I feel like this is the most common question I get. This is actually Squid. This is a note taking app that I use on a Chromebook, a Chrome OS device where we have. Where I'm able to use my Lenovo smart pen, active pen, whatever they call it on the Chrome pixelbook here and write these notes for you. And I'm screen sharing through Streamyard. If you want affiliate links for those, go to processdriven.com links or/hub. Yeah, hub, that one. All right, so digging in through here, once you have these processes documented, you've gotten over your fear of having a conditional process and you're thinking, okay, I've got these out of my head, now what do I do with them? The next thing I want you to do is look at your process. Whatever you've written down, whether it's your content, repurposing your newsletter, process your client experience and start to sort them. I like to use colors to do this, but you could also write them in words. But I want you to sort them in to what tool or what person and or you know, it could be two different things is doing the task. So if we are looking at client onboarding, I know many of you use Dubsado and ClickUp. That combination. As much as Dubsado frustrates me personally, I haven't been able to kick it out to the curb yet just due to those workflow features. I know many people will have their onboarding process happen in Dubsado. So red in this instance means Dubsado, not to be confused with Dubs Dub, the screen recording tool. And then maybe after the Dubsado project kicks off, they flip over into change the color too excitedly. Then they flip over to managing the project in ClickUp. So from that point on, the actual tasks and service delivery happens in ClickUp. So go ahead and take your process. If you haven't written it down, start there. But once you have your process written down, start either color coding or writing words, if you have them in a word document, to sort your things by tool. What we've started to create by doing this is we have our recipe for what we need to do next. Anyone have questions on this? While I'm going to type in, give stuff in here, click up. All right, that's blue. We're just going to roll with it. So we've color coded by software. We've given ourselves a recipe of where we need to go from this point. You have your process written down. You know what tool goes in. What if you don't know what tool it should go in? Contact someone like me or someone else who can help you kind of suss through the noise and define that tech stack. Most of you probably have enough tools already in your toolbox that you're paying enough subscriptions that you have the tools you need. Even if one of those tools is just my email, you know, you could just have your inbox as one of the tools manually. Once you have that, we need to create to do lists from this. And this is where ClickUp can be helpful. But we can say, all right, these steps of the process need to end up in ClickUp. These steps in the process need to end up in Dubsado. And this is where a process map provides a lot of utility, because you'll see we have a conditional process, right? It goes in different places. Each chunk, each portion of this workflow needs to go into a different location. So it's going to start looking really funky. These pieces are probably going to become a Dubsado workflow, like I said. So this will be canned emails that you need to make one by one by one. It'll be a scheduler. You need to bake one by one, piecing them together into a workflow. As you're in that construction zone, nothing's going to make sense, nothing's going to tie into the big picture. And so this workflow map is going to be your guide of what you need to do. Similarly, when we're onto the ClickUp side of the process, which many of you might exclusively be in the ClickUp side, you're going to be looking at one branch of the process at a time and creating templates based on that branch. So if this, let's just say this condition is, are they a fit or not? Let's just assume this is like an onboarding process. I'm going to go back to black here. We might say this is the Not a fit process. And this is a fit process like they're a good fit for us as a client. Well, your fit process is going to be probably your client onboarding. Let's just assume that's 100% manual here. So we're going to create one template in ClickUp for our onboarding. And if you don't know how to make templates in ClickUp, take a second here and go back to some of my other videos where I talk about the ways to create templates. Two, I think weeks ago, it's on YouTube now, six different ways to create a template in ClickUp. Check that out. It goes from intermediate or I should say it goes from beginner to more of the advanced ways. Whether you're using a task template or a document. We, we want to create a process for one leg of the journey. And again this process map is our thing that ties it all together because otherwise we're just looking at a bunch of little lost templates. So we create our onboarding process right here and then this Not a fit process. Well, this is probably more of a follow up process. Why jump to ClickUp? Mario, explain your question a little bit more then I'll probably answer that. Seems like a disconnect. Trying to read your mind here. Trying to, trying to channel my Mario. Jumping into ClickUp. We're talking about going from you have a client and you're managing the task or managing the project in ClickUp in terms of a hypothetical scenario. So yeah, loop back in with your question. We can loop back to it because I think it might just be misunderstanding. So we've got our process. We start making the template in ClickUp whether it's a task or a document. Then we go to the other leg of the journey and we create this and we'll call this our not a fit process of following up with somebody who's not a good fit. But we want to make sure we either close that loop, maybe we want to just follow up. Maybe we have a referral process we need to do. This is our process number two. So in this and actually in this one workflow map, we end up creating three different templates. Say we're using ClickUp exclusively, three different ones in ClickUp. If we're using a bunch of different tools, three different processes end up in three different areas, all connected by this visual map of our process. So if you have conditional processes, chunk it, take it into chunks. If there's no condition, well, don't worry about it. You can make it one long process, one long Template. But if you have conditions, taking it in pieces would be the way to attack this in order to actually create. To go from this process map to having that onboarding process. Watch some of the videos on templating. The email newsletter video goes over step by step of taking it from this point, creating your ingredients, pulling it all together and ClickUp so you can watch that one too. Yeah, Mario, jump back with your question because I feel like I misunderstood you on that one. So let me know where you're at. Similarly, if you're using more of the outline method, it's the same approach, right? We're grouping by tool and we're starting to build out our workflows in this scenario I gave you just to handle a common question that hasn't come up here, but it normally does. What if your tool set or your people set is a little bit more complex? What if your project starts in ClickUp, then goes to say Dubsado for some reason, and then it goes back to ClickUp. Now that's a little purple, but let's just imagine that still ClickUp there we would be able to create a template that has a either manual or automated pause at a point in the process. Step one could be a subtask that says create the contact. And step two says, wait until Dubsado goes through the onboarding workflow. And then step three says, all right, now do the next thing. In that way, ClickUp still has the full process, even though you have Dubsado as an ingredient of this workflow. I know this one's hard because I don't have a good visual aid for it, but hopefully this is landing for you. Let me know if this is making sense in ClickUp, which I don't have a good screenshot of it, but I'm just going to give you a visual aid by drawing here in ClickUp when you have your tasks area. So we've got our activity, our little chat. Over here you've got your task information, including all that good stuff in ClickUp. When you have templates, they all stack. So as you have your first template applied, it might add step one and two. You'll save that as your onboarding template or your part a template. If you apply another template to that same task or same list, it all kind of combines. So we could have a second template. This is template number one. We could have a second template that adds step three or four. If there's conditions, we could have a step. We could call this to a. If there was a conditions, we could either automatically or manually add a different step three or step four by having two different templates that we could choose to apply. Okay, question. I'm trying to understand if Dubsado is missing something on the task management side. Oh yes, yes, yes. Okay, those of us who are using Dubsado, you're all probably nodding the question that just came in and let's see if I can highlight it. There we go. I'm trying to understand if Dubsado is missing something on the task management side that tasks need to be handled in. Click ClickUp. I'm not very familiar with Dubsado, so back up. In the beginning of this I talked about how you might be using different tools. I gave that Dubsado as an example because I know many of you are using Dubsado, but this could also be, you know, reply IO, maybe you're using it for your email follow up. You could be using Air Call because there's a phone call stage or Calendly's owning a step of your process. Very rarely does a process only use one tool if it has any automations in it. Most likely it's including something beyond just ClickUp. So I can use Dubsado as an example. The reason I did is because you're all using it. And yes, to answer this specific piece, Dubsado is lacking a ton on the task management side. They have a wonderful workflow feature, which is why myself and many others are still reluctantly using it. But it's not the best tool for task management. Much like if you are a lawyer and I was talking this morning, Clio is it has task management but it is clunky and it is not a task manager. Dubsado, just like honeybook or 17 hats, falls into the business manager category. So it has those features like invoicing time, tracking expenses and in and I already said invoices and contracts and forms and questionnaires and such. And that's really where they spent more of their energy around the business, business management and client experience. Automation, not so much on the task side. So I'd pull it up but it would take too much time. Dubsado's task management is a very very simple and slow process. Whereas a best in class task manager like ClickUp, well you'll often pull that into the workflow to get a really sharp and quick project management experience. So hopefully that answers your question. So whether you have a workflow map or a workflow outline, this is how you take it and handle those conditions. Taking it in chunks and building out in other places back A few weeks ago, I made a video about why process mapping matters and I should have said, but I. Or maybe I kind of did. But this is one of the reasons that having a process map before you get started matters. If you actually go to Dubsado, they have a fantastic video series on how to get started on Dubsado and they start off with a shout out to workflow mapping because they know as you start building things you have to go to 15 different tabs to build out a workflow. You are going to get lost unless you have this kind of visual aid that holds it all together. In businesses, when we have four different tools we're using to manage our client experience, from our phone calls to our scheduler to our, I don't know, our invoicing, if that's all different tools, it can be really hard to keep track of where someone is in the process. But by having this visual map or maybe even having this full visual somewhere in ClickUp, we can make it more visual both for the setup and for the ongoing management of the project at each stage. Okay, I talked really fast there. I'm going to keep moving on here and if you have questions, please do jump in. I want to make sure I get to those first. Now, I give you example of an easy way you can use this kind of thinking of a workflow map as your home base to then build off of. And I'm going to give you the example that I'm selfishly going through right now to figure out a content puzzle. Now, I know some of you in this group are content or marketing whizzes. I am not. So this is a new area for me to explore. And when I started trying to think about content or content strategy or a content calendar and actually went to ClickUp for a calendar because I was thinking, all right, this is where this stuff is going to live. I did exactly what I was telling you not to do. I started in ClickUp versus starting with the workflow app. And I now have this instinct if I'm ever lost in something or I find myself lost in the weeds, I can't really get a sense of where I'm building towards or what I'm building. I'm going to take a pause, grab a pen and paper usually. Actually, I do use a still a pen and paper, an old notebook here, and I start mapping out visually how all of the stuff I'm doing connects. So when it comes to content, we're going to flip over here. To me, that looks like building a series of content that connects to a learning objective. In this case, I've been trying to figure out at the month level, how can all of my content connect to, say, maybe give a story or get people to an end result every single month? Many of you know that clicking up is now a thing. So started off in Scroop, it's kind of this learning community about mastering ClickUp and getting more of your business processes into ClickUp. And as that has come to pass, as that has kind of come alive, it's really highlighted to me the importance of connecting YouTube and this Facebook group and clicking up into kind of one cohesive story. So people who are in all three of those feel like they are getting a full narrative. And people who are just in Facebook or just on YouTube, they're missing a piece of. And that would maybe inspire them to be a little bit more involved, to see the full story and know that there's always more waiting for them in the next group. My pet peeve is when you join a Facebook group and it's just the same thing as YouTube, like, why would you bother joining it? I don't want to have that for you guys. So I've been trying to think more intentionally about this. And that is where my cross tool or my conditional workflow has come up just this week. So here, and I hope this is an interesting example. I just wanted to give you one here. Here is my own workflow. So this is kind of messy, but that is the nature of workflow mapping here. Always change my color before I change the highlighter. But there it is. What I have is kind of the narrative structure, the workflow of learning, if you will, of how I'm approaching this upcoming month. And this is going to change how these actual Wednesdays are going. The flow I'm thinking for each month right now is I'm going to introduce a workflow or a type of thing that you can structure with workflows or processes and talk about how maybe status quo. I have things organized. Moving from there, I'm going to go to the strategy and research, which I've talked about in several of these lives, how I go about researching a different process, how I find different tips or tricks about how to approach a certain topic. From that point, we go on to actually mapping the workflow. You guys are pretty familiar with what that looks like. And that's where we're at here. From there, we're going to introduce some of the really new stuff and go into a Build with Me session. Now, this would be in the clicking of Community piece. After that I want to go back to YouTube and do a use case. Top tips. Now this to me feels like a logical structure of building out learning on a topic. But where this gets into the whole conditional workflow is that these are not all happening in the same place. In fact, I'm kind of going back and forth between which will be where. But I, I'm thinking the mapping the workflow will happen in Facebook. The type of workflow will probably be in Facebook. We're going to do red. The strategy and research is going to probably be behind the scenes interview in the clicking up community. The build with me session is definitely going to be happening in the clicking up community. That'll be a, that'll be really fun. I'll be actually building out a full ClickUp template live with people based on the workflow we mapped in the Facebook group and then revising it and giving everybody that template. I'm actually really excited for that. And then I should have saved red for YouTube, but oh well, YouTube is going to be pink and then these other ones are going to end up on YouTube and so they're going to end up on different channels and the process to get them onto those is going to be different. The repurposing process or repurposing workflow I have is a whole different ClickUp template. And each one of these kinds of arrows represents a different process that needs to happen to get content into different places. I just Talked for like 10 minutes straight on this. What do you guys think, those of you who are joining me live, does this make sense and see how this is relating, how I'm mapping this out to get it out of my head. And I'm going to take this and I'm going to start building my processes based on this workflow map. This repurposing process to go from a mapping workflow Facebook live into a YouTube Wednesday video, that's one process I can document. This one is another kind of repurposing. It has a different flow and I'm starting to just build my to do list of all of the different processes or SOPs I need to create by starting with this workflow map. Okay, makes sense. Okay, good. So I'm going to use this as my to do list. I usually take this then and I translate this into ClickUp. So I had a question come up the other week where it's like, all right, you talk about making these SOPs. How do you track the creation of SOPs? Well, we're working in a wonderful task management System. Each of these is going to become a task for myself, an SOP to create. So this one will be called something like create an SOP for taking a strategy and research YouTube video. Or I'm forgetting the colors, clicking up video and turning it into a YouTube video. That'll become a task assigned to me with a due date and a whole process for processes laid out. This will become another one. This one probably will also become another one. And whether these ones really connect or if there's just kind of some promotion I need to do between each step of these, these are additional processes that I need to document. This is how I decide what processes I need to invest my energy in. This is how I am approaching my content, trying to make it more intentional. And this is the same kind of thing. This is about content, but this is the same thing you can do for any type of process in your business. Get it out of your head. Start identifying the missing processes and SOPs, and then start creating them by managing that process in ClickUp or even storing those processes in ClickUp like I do and many of you do. Okay, so the magic of doing this now is I have my running list to work off of. I can start delegating from this place and I can share this picture. Probably a little bit cleaned up, but I could share this picture with the people who I have helping me to say, hey, this is where we're going towards, you know, Suzy Q. Can you handle this first process to go from here to here? We already have a process for repurposing YouTube videos. So I could take that template, copy it, make a modification for the specific instance of repurposing, and save that as a template as a video moves through these processes. Actually, that's a good example here. The creation of this video is going to be a template, and then the repurposing is going to be a template that adds onto it, or perhaps it'll be a duplicate of the task or something like that. These are two templates that are going to work together and build one longer process by having two pieces, just like we did back here, where we had two different processes combining to build a larger process map. So I hope that makes sense. This is one of those ones that, like, really made sense in my brain. And as I'm saying it, I'm like, this might go totally over people's heads. Mario, I'm glad you're with me. We've got one in the crowd. Who's. Who's following this, this stream here. So that is where I'M at and I'm gonna, I'm gonna end this, wrap this up with kind of clarifying what this means for you guys here on this live stream. As you saw in that visual map that I had on the page, I'm going to be shifting some of the content to tell more of a narrative. It'll be categorized. This whole process you see over here is going to be happening over a month's time. So you're going to see the same conversation kind of building up over a 4ish week period where we're going to start talking about the area of your business that you could be more intentional about, how you can start building that out and so on and so forth. If you want to be part of the full conversation, definitely get into the Facebook group and subscribe on YouTube because that's where both pieces of the conversation are going to happen. And if you want all of the conversation, obviously join Clicking up because, because that is now coming out and that's going to be where those Build With Me sessions. We're going to go so much more in depth than what we ever have in this Facebook group and it's going to be happening in clicking up. This is going to give me kind of the different prompts and because this is going to give me a framework or a structure to look at this content, you're probably going to be able to see a little bit more of, a little bit more scheduling of forecasting of what the topics are going to be each week. But as always, I'm looking for you guys to help me decide over here what type of workflow should we work on? What strategy do you care about learning? And all of this stuff is going to be. The content is going to be popped into this framework based on your feedback that comes in over these coming weeks. But yeah, I think that's pretty much it for this workflow Wednesday. This is how you can break a long process, break it up into multiple tools, into multiple templates. This is how this is going to change the workflow Wednesdays that you are watching right now. These are going to become slightly less frequent frequent to make a four week process. These are probably going to become an every other week Wednesday livestream, but hopefully it'll have a higher quality content and help you build on a specific topic versus kind of covering whatever is on my mind. So if you have any thoughts on that, I'd love to hear it in the comments. I think that's a good idea. If you're excited about it, let me know. Additionally, if there's a certain type of workflow or type of process that you are interested in learning about. Please do write that in the comments. So some of the ones that have come up for me are CRM or Content Relationship Management. That seems like a workflow that has been highly requested by folks, so if that's something you're interested in, let me know. I'm thinking that'll probably be our first one. The other types of processes that I think are candidates to be in months two or three would be content management and actually what's the other one here? I had it here. Content management process for processes, meaning the actual process you go through for creating documentation, which I've covered in small ways. Personal habits, human resources, meaning internal talent management processes and and so on. Yeah, so those are a few different ideas of what types of topics we could focus on on these months, but I'm really going to look to you guys to help me decide what to cover. Said I'm thinking CRM first, but depends what you guys say on the comments of this video. So that is it for this workflow. Wednesday we have taken the process that we've created, broken it up into pieces, talked about how you'd create those into a template without actually showing ClickUp too much. Today we've talked about ClickUp and Dubsado, how they kind of work hand in hand and why they need to work hand in hand because neither is perfect at everything. We've talked about how I'm taking this framework and applying it to my own content strategy or, you know, experimenting a little bit to go from having an unintentional kind of COVID whatever comes up content strategy, which I think many of us start there. Many of us start there in our business. We also start there in our content. And now I'm trying to take it to this intentional place. And just like when you're trying to take your business workflows to an intentional place, when I'm trying to take my content workflows to an intentional place, I'm starting on paper or on tablet. I am starting by getting my workflows out of my head and building a narrative that makes sense, then taking that narrative, breaking it up into the respective places and using that to build out the technology to support the workflow versus trying to jam my workflow into a technology. When you're on paper, the only limit is your own understanding. And because of the question that came up, I'm going to say it again here. Thank you for the vote on CRM and content management training. I think those, I'm excited about those too. But to answer the question that came up at the very beginning, the tool that you are seeing on your screen here is actually a tool called Squid and it is broadcast through streamyard here. If you'd like to know more about my setup, if you go to ProcessDriven Co Hub, you will actually be able to see my. I think all the tools I use, pretty much almost all of them are on there, if possible. So you can go in there and I will share this on screen. You can actually see all the tools and tech and equipment that I'm using right now. So that is it for this one. Thank you for the votes. Please keep them coming in even if you're watching the live play. I'm going to be using this to set up the schedule and you're going to start seeing that schedule come out in the Facebook group, in the content community, on YouTube, all that good stuff. So definitely leave your vote. I've got one for CRM and content management, but I'd love to see some more come in here. So thank you guys for joining me live and I will see you next Wednesday, if not sooner, in the Facebook group. So thank you guys so much and have a good one.