Example ClickUp Dashboards | 10 Use Cases

Once you've mastered the basics of dashboards and you understand how dashboard widgets work, your mind is probably starting to spin and you're thinking, okay, how exactly can I use dashboards and dashboard widgets in ClickUp to actually help my business, you know, operate? Or maybe you're on the personal side of things and you're just trying to organize your personal life and you have no idea how to leverage this feature to make things easier. Well, this video is for you, but first, a bit of background. My name is Layla and I'm a vetted ClickUp consultant. I work with people to set up their ClickUp accounts. I and usually it's part of more of a process and process documentation project where ClickUp is one central piece to helping their business feel a little bit more organized and getting that business instruction manual gathered. Now, when I'm working with clients one on one, oftentimes dashboards can be a challenging area because if you don't know what you want your dashboards to look like, it can be hard to know what data to track in ClickUp. But at the same time, the reverse is true. If you don't know what you want your ClickUp to look like, it can be hard to know what you want your dashboards to look like. And this can be kind of a chicken and egg situation that people get paralyzed in, which is why I think a lot of people underutilize dashboards just because they're such a blank slate. So this video is actually a response to a video I did a few weeks back where you guys overwhelmingly said that you would like to hear more about use cases when it comes to dashboards. Now, before you go into this video, make sure you're familiar with widgets. I won't be going into the build outs for each one of these dashboards. I'll just be showing you some examples. So if you need to learn more about widgets, go here first and then come back to this episode and that'll allow you to deconstruct all the dashboards I show you here so you can create them on your own. Now, without ado, let's go check out these dashboards. Here we are. As promised, I'm going to take you through my ClickUp account to 10 different dashboards that I could see people using to help manage their work a little bit easier using ClickUp dashboards. These are the 10 that we're going to be going through, so stay till the end so you see every single one. We're going to start off with a time Tracking audit dashboard. Here we just have a simple chat widget helping you kind of answer any questions you might have about time tracking. We have a timesheet widget, which is exactly what you'd expect for something around time tracking, where it can show me where I was spending my time and the details of each piece. Then I also have this fun little filtered task widget. And now this is where the real utility comes in. This is a task list. This is a task list widget. I'm going to open that up so you can see the settings here. Task list. It's showing everything from all locations grouped by assignee. It's including archived close. I could include subtasks if I wanted to. It's showing basically everything and it's filtering out to only show me ones that are in the closed section status and have no time tracked. By filtering like this, I'm basically giving myself a second chance to catch any ones that I might have missed time tracking on because I was in a hurry. So, for example, maybe I'm looking at this and thinking, whoa, no, I definitely spent an hour on that board game Cafe project. I could come in here, make a quick correction, add in the time that I should have added, click save and go back on my merry way. Now you'll notice, Layla, why didn't that delete right away? Because it's now has time tracked. It's because our dashboards need a little bit of time to refresh. So I'm just going to force it to refresh now so we can see if that disappears. Voila, There it goes. So this is a time tracking audit dashboard. I think it's pretty handy for those of us who track our time. Next up is a team dashboard. You've seen me talk about this one in the past. This is a simple kind of a meeting dashboard. So you could pull in certain tasks whether you filter it by a tag. Here I have the tag sales meeting. You could also filter it by other qualities that you might use, such as a dropdown or something else, or just all tab tasks in a location. Then we have a meeting agenda area. So this is a chat widget where we timestamp and paste in the notes from each meeting. And then on the right, we have kind of our working agenda template. So each week we would type in our notes on here. When we're finished the meeting, we would paste it in. So it's a timestamped area to add into our ongoing list of agendas. So in that way we kind of have our working draft and we have our published agendas. This is a very simple, very simple way to manage your team meetings. But it's a nice starting point because you'll see this is just text. But from this I could add an action item I can type, which I might not be able to. We could add an action item and actually create the task straight from the agenda. So when we talk about making an interactive agenda by just using this text block, which is all this is, this is a text widget here. Just with the text widget we can make these agendas. And this has now created a task in this location that I selected to give me follow up actions from this meeting. I could even assign that to somebody if I wanted to give that to somebody to make sure that it doesn't get lost. So this is how I would pretty much approach most meetings as kind of a starter draft to figure out how you can start using ClickUp. Meetings are a great place to begin. Okay, next up we have our company dashboard. Now this is another fun one that I think a lot of teams could benefit from. This is just kind of an overall audit. And this is a great time to point out that when you see things like this that are embedded views, the embedded views are always stuck in ClickUp's white color. So if you are in dark mode and you have embedded views that look really ugly. So just for the sake of our eyes here, I'm going to flip over to light mode so that way we can see this in a prettier way. All right, we are back in light mode now. Our embedded view looks a little bit nicer and we're ready to keep going. If you don't know about light mode and dark mode of ClickUp, by the way, I do have a video on that. I'll probably link it up here. If not, just search for it. All right, so here is our company dashboard. We've just got an overview of everything here. We have a flow widget which is basically showing us over time how many, in this case tasks do we have in each type of status. Now it's a little bit hard to see here when it's so small. I can make it a little bit bigger and you can see how things change over time. But I love using this status, especially for teams who want to kind of get a sense of where they're at as a company. How much do we have open, how much are we working on, how much is finished? And this kind of, this visual helps people kind of get a sense of where the business is at. So as we're onboarding a team on ClickUp, we'll see this area just skyrocket on all fronts. There's going to be a lot of new tasks, a lot of new in progress stuff, but over time you're going to see more and more things going into in progress and then finally into that done category so you can have a better sense of where the overall business is. If you have a lot of stuff in progress and your to do list just keeps growing, maybe it's a sign that your team's taking on a bit too much or there's too much in the pipeline that's not really being finished. It's just getting started. So let's keep going through here we've got a text widget with some quick reference links and all company chat. Again, another chat widget, a who is behind chart. Because I do think that's one of the most useful ones, especially for teams that are new to ClickUp. We could filter by who's unclearing or who hasn't cleared their notifications recently. This is a great way to get a sense of who hasn't been logging in or who just doesn't know notifications are there. This is definitely something I would keep an eye on if you're onboarding your team. And then we have an embedded company calendar. About this one before, because this is actually one that I use in my own workspace and I absolutely love it. Basically it is two chat widgets and two text widgets. I know, super, super simple, but it is hugely valuable. So first we have just a water. This is, you know, if you slack the hashtag general, the general channel. This is just kind of our general place to talk about anything that comes up. Might be totally off topic, but just having a place to put that makes it again gives you that other defense line against things going into email or text or something else. Then we get to our weekly updates. Now this is where we use our template, which I have right here. In a text widget you copy and paste that. Not all of it just spark. We copy this, paste it into here and everyone gives an update each week on just like how they're doing. This is an asynchronous scrum method which I really like, especially with remote teams where you have people kind of all over the place doing different things. It's a really nice way to stay in touch without having to worry about getting everyone together in one zoom meeting. Because. Because I think we've all had plenty of zoom meetings on our schedules in a week. Okay, so moving on here, the other area is just a quick reference link. So if you have maybe your files that you're going into, your team handbook, maybe links to the clients that you're working on their websites, stuff like that could go right here. This is just again, a typed in area with quick reference links, but I do find it super, super helpful. All right, so next up is our client work version one. I've got a few different ways to manage projects on here with dashboards. This one starts off with a text widget and another text widget. The first one is just kind of your project over you. You could link to documents or files or links or whatever else. And then the other one is just your list of open questions. So things that you need to get answers on, you could just hard type them in here. But I prefer to turn things into tasks so that they also have that extra layer of visibility. So just like our agenda, we'd highlight things, we'd add them as a task, put them somewhere that we want to put them, and then we just move on on our day, create. Awesome. The other thing in here is a completed report just letting you know what was recently done. I think that's a good, like morale booster. Above that is your overall statuses. So when we're looking at our whole. If we were to think about this as a pie chart, that's just spread out. If we were to look at this project and just get a sense of where we are, that is what that status overview is telling us, then we have time budgeted versus time tracked. This is just a helpful one for those of us who either bill hourly or our project based but still use hours to kind of get a sense of how, you know, how we're doing on the project. Because just because your project based doesn't mean you shouldn't track your time. Okay. The final one is a filtered task list. Once again, this one's filtered by a custom field called approved or not approved. I'm actually going to add that in here so you can see what I'm talking about here. If I add this in, let's find it. Oh, this is so messy. There we go. Approval. So we could flip things between these different stages of approval and go back and forth and that'll tell us what's going to show up here. So this is just an example of how you can sort these task lists by different things. I've also seen people who use these and they'll set them up and they'll also group them by due date. Again, same task list We've been using in a bunch of these dashboards. We're just sorting them in different ways. So I don't know if any of these. Ooh, some of them do have due dates. There we go. And you'll see things grouped in that way. There we go. There's even more when I get rid of that due date. So there we go on that one. We're going to keep moving on into the next one. Client work version two. All right, here we are. This is another version of a client work or a project based dashboard. Very similar layout. We've got an overview on the left side, um, we have a client profile or kind of like you might have a client doc embedded below it where maybe we have a picture of the client. I've seen people do that if they have brick and mortar where they actually want to be able to recognize the person who comes in. Another cumulative flow chart here, tracked and budgeted with a typo. Hey, this is a good time to demonstrate how easy it is to rename these. We've got another filtered tasks, a discussion. We've added in this case a priority chart as well as tasks by assignee. So if those are important to you, add those in as well as another completed report. So this is a good time to point out that what you should put in your dashboard depends on what you actually care about. I know it's bad to admit, but I don't really use priority flags in my workspace very much personally. So if you're not using them, this little widget is going to do nothing for you. But if you are someone that uses that, and if that's important for you to get a sense of the urgency of all the overall tasks, then go ahead and use them. Similarly, if you're the only person in your business, a task by assignee chart probably isn't worth adding. But if you have a large team and they're all supposed to be pulling their weight evenly and you find that one person, maybe it's taking on a lot and finding themselves bogged down, then maybe some of these by assignee charts are going to be more useful to you. So really you need to know what you're looking for to know what these dashboards should be like for you. Next up is a client portal. Now, I've shown this, I think in other ways in older videos before, so I'm not really going to go too much into it here. This looks a lot like the client project area or a project area, but this is really designed for your client to come in and be able to interact or not so much interact with this area. So what's included here is once again cumulative flow, which is love that chart. Next we have another filtered task view here. We did give them the ability to click on something and open it up a little bit wider. Next we have just a chat area. This was my client. I'd probably have a like message me here. I usually have kind of an instructional message in these so that people know that hey, this is for you to write in to have that kind of chat area. We've got a budget and time tracked. This would be if you're doing kind of an hourly based project. And then in the center we have a view only ClickUp doc. So you click on here the pages. We might have our whole project template in here. We could create little icons and different things. This is view only. I'll show you the original document. So here we are in the original document. The way I got to create that link is just by going up here to share and creating a public document. And that link is non editable. And so that's what I put in my client area because I don't want them to be able to edit the document in this case I. I should also add, you really can't put the editable version of a document in a dashboard, only the non editable one. So just something to keep in mind. If you wanted to have your clients be able to edit this dashboard, you'd want to give them the link and sharing access to the original document. You wouldn't be able to put that directly in a dashboard other than just, you know, putting that link somewhere and giving it to them that way. So keep that in mind. Moving on with our client portal, we're going to go onto goals and planning because this is one that I've had a lot of requests for Now. I've been pretty open in the fact that I don't use the built in goals feature very often. ClickUp. I know it's great. I know there's so much potential here. I have played with them, I've set them up once or twice trying to do it and I just found them far too out of the way. When I would try to do my goal planning, I just didn't think in that very rigid like click through a million times format that is built into that goals area. So instead I built myself a dashboard. Mine doesn't look quite like this, but more or less you get the idea. You can put your annual goal up here in a text widget. Then we have a kind of a column per quarter, which I very poorly labeled here. But you can have your goals for each quarter here, just as checkboxes. I actually do this in my team check ins, so it's always right there whenever we're having our scrum. So I can see it and revisit our goals. We can check these off here because they are interactive bullet points and we can write whatever we want. Sometimes I'll see people add context like you could add right below it. This goal description here. You can even mention people so that they know that they're responsible is in charge. Not the same visibility of the task, but it's good to have in there. So we've got this going. Moving on through. We've also have a brainstorm or a parking lot area over here. If you're someone that needs to kind of get things out of your head, this would be the place to go before you put things into the goals. I would also use brainstorming for goals that are for the future. So Q4 or Q1 of next year. You want to just kind of put these thoughts out here. Maybe your five year plan would go here. That is a great use case. If you had an outside tool that you're using, you might also want to embed that here. So if you were using something else like notion to kind of in plug plan your life, you could put that link here so that you can easily jump into that notion book and kind of pick up where you're left off and in the corner here. Just because I've never really done this and I thought, hey, why not? I've embedded just a quote from Twitter because you can. And it's one of those widgets where I'm like, well that's really nice, but I don't see why you would ever do that. I embedded a specific quote. You could also embed a feed, I mean, in case you were curious. I guess that's there. So there you go. Moving on to our second to last here. We've got KPI tracking, so I'm gonna click on that. This one is a little bit of a cheat because I'm not actually using ClickUp for the KPIs now. You could, but I just. It doesn't. ClickUp is not a database and I just don't think it does as great of a job as something like Airtable or Excel or Google Sheets. And so when we're talking KPIs for myself personally, I always use an outside tool and then embed it into ClickUp now you're like leila, what? You have two of the same charts here. I'm going to make these a bit bigger so we can see them. I have indeed embedded a Google Sheet two times in here. The reason I do it twice, even though it's the same data, is because I like to see them side by side. So I have the source data in one tab. I'll just open this up so you can see the original thing. Okay, so here's the actual Google Sheet right there. From within ClickUp, I'm able to edit this, which is really fun. And I've got all my different tabs here, my source data, my charts and so on. And I have the same exact link, the public link for that document embedded in here twice. So that way I can view them side by side. So we've got our source data here and we've got our charts below. They're pulling in for the three different columns so that they're three different charts. Let's just make this a bit bigger because I can't seem to ever. There we go. Nice. All right. And one thing that's fun about this is you notice I'm able to edit in here just seamlessly. So if I wanted to change the way these charts looked, I could go in here and just add these pieces without having to really worry about that would have been a good month without really having to worry about going into another tool. That is why Google Sheets versus some of the other cloud based options, or Google in general versus some of the other cloud based options is a pretty good tool to look at because of how well it connects with ClickUp. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw more things like this for maybe onedrive or Dropbox Paper coming down the line. But as of right now, Google Sheets and Google Products, as you see in here, are some of the best ones to have embedded. Because when you embed it, it truly is interactive versus other tools that I embed in here. Yes, they have embed codes. They kind of show up, but when you click on them, it just opens it in another tab. Anyway, so it's basically just a really big hyperlink. So this is how I would go about KPI tracking in here. I would have a task in my workspace saying, pull your monthly numbers. Give it to each person with the numbers that they need to pull, have them put them each in here either manually or through some other way and check my numbers. You could also have this stuff pull in with zaps or more sophisticated methods. But personally, I'm still doing things manually because I feel like I'm only looking at a few key numbers. So it makes sense for me to take the time to actually look at them by pulling them. So that's just my two cents. You'll see. I also have kind of a text area on the side. I like to use this for those macro goals which might connect back to this goals and Planning dashboard because your KPIs are usually working towards something you're measuring to optimize for something. And it'd be nice to have a space to just expand all of that. Oh, and while we're here, let me point out that every single one of these widgets has a full screen button. So as we're getting kind of cramped on the screen, we can always full screen like I did before. So that way we can have a little bit more space to actually think through these things. Now, finally, we have the Personal and Business Mix dashboard. And this is one that I just kind of started playing with because I know a big request from the last video. You guys wanted to see some more stuff about how to mix personal and business life in here. And to answer the questions that came up a lot in those comments, I actually do manage a bit of my personal life through ClickUp in a separate space, but in the same account. It's not a huge emphasis for me because I feel like the complexity of ClickUp is a little bit overkill for most personal tracking. But there is some good stuff. I'm going to show you how you might be able to visualize that here in this dashboard. If you'd like to see more about the personal side of using ClickUp, please do leave a comment, because that'd be something I'd be interested in exploring if there's interest. All right, so here we are in the personal and business mix again, using a lot of text widgets, but also some fun other things. We've got a text widget at the top for just kind of your word of the year, your quote, anything like that that's important to you. We also have a parking lot, so just kind of an area to put like your big ideas, your brainstorms. And we could, you know, endlessly scroll down here, expand this if we need some more room. I have my daily agenda on the left side. So this is just pulling in from either all locations, you can have everything, or you could filter it in some other way. If you go under here in Settings, you'll see how this is set up. It's an actual embed link from an area in ClickUp, if I click on things, they are interactive. Because when I again set up the public sharing link, I did check the little box that says, yes, you can embed this and let people click on the tasks from the embed area. And let me just explain what that looks like. When I'm here and in my calendar view and I go to share, to share the link, you can see that I have these options. So I could turn this off, turn it back on. All these options show up, but the most important one is this right here. Click to open tasks from this view. Do I want to let people do that? Since I'm sharing this link with just me, I'm pretty okay with that. And I could just check that on. And that's why I'm able to interact with them in the dashboard. So back in the dashboard, just to cover over these last few areas, as I'm filtering, all the embeds are loading. Here I have another interactive embed and this is my habits by Day. I have a dropdown custom field called day, and then I have these tasks in there. Anyway, so we have our two embedded views here. Below that I have a task list widget, pulling from everything and just basically saying anything that's assigned to me and is due in the next seven days. Just keep it on my radar. So that way I can quickly kind of skim through and get a sense of what's coming up. And finally, I again have my Twitter tweet, because I don't even use Twitter, but I just wanted to have a reason to play with more embed options. So that is my crash course into some use cases for dashboards. Is this exhaustive? No. Is this something that you should probably just directly copy and paste? No, because you can't actually template or copy and paste dashboards. You have to make them all by hand. But is this something that will give you some good inspiration as to how you could use them? I hope so. And finally, if you enjoyed this content and you'd like to see more stuff like it, but you'd also like to stop having to look at YouTube to figure out how to use ClickUp, you just kind of want someone to guide you through the process. Maybe you should check clickingup Community. This is going to be a paid community where I'm going to be sharing swipe files, templates, build with me sessions, and a crash course on how to use ClickUp that you can share with yourself or your team. So you can get to that expert level a lot faster with less of those winding loops of trying to figure things out on YouTube. So if that's interesting to you, definitely check the description below for the link to this page. All right, enough about me. This is probably a long enough video. Thank you guys so much for watching and I will see you in the next one. 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 co.