Hidden (Helpful) ClickUp Features | ClickUp Beginner Tricks & Tips

Hey everybody. Layla here with another video focused on ClickUp. This time it's going to be a little bit more abstract rather than focusing on just one feature. This whole video is dedicated to the little things, the little icons, the little shortcuts, the little tiny pieces that will take you from being a savvy ClickUp beginner, or maybe just total ClickUp beginner, to being a more sophisticated, confident, intermediate level ClickUp user. We talking about the shortcuts, the little hidden things, the tiny pieces that can help you make ClickUp a little bit more your own. Then you probably wouldn't notice if you're just starting to use the tool. So without further ado, let me first introduce the face down here. My name is Layla and I run ProcessDriven. In addition to my Facebook group, I run a business where I help others set up systems and software such as this. But my focus is around helping people design their workflows and processes to scale their business efficiently. So in my Facebook group, I talk live with my peeps about this. So if you're interested in having some more discussion about your ClickUp, talking about software more generally or ways that you can streamline your business, definitely join that Facebook group. That and a lot more information is in the description. Now back to this video. In the description you will also find a table of contents. So if you're looking for a specific feature explained, check the table of contents, kind of the quick hyperlinks, and you'll be able to jump around this video to the areas that are most interesting, interesting to you. While you are there, be sure to subscribe because I would appreciate it and you know, good karma. So let's dive into today's video. Okay, so today we are talking about little things and I want to start with the littlest, topmost thing that I think people don't notice when they're starting to use ClickUp. And that is this Favorites bar. Now, I'm not sure by default whether it's pinned or not, but I have it pinned. I'm going to unpin it here just for sake. Over here in the sidebar you will notice there is this favorite section and if you go ahead and you pin pins to the top. But what is the Favorites bar? The Favorites bar is basically a quick reference list of different views that you have saved. So for example, maybe this schedule to me is very, very important. So I'm going to add it to Favorites and I'm going to give it. I don't even know what this is. Clothing schedule. And it adds it to the favorites of my ClickUp account. It's this very topmost section. What's nice about this is that view, which is maybe that's very important to me, that governs everything in my life. I can access it from any single space I am at in my ClickUp, which is nice. So you're always flipping around, but you can always, no matter where you are, if you're in your inbox, you're like, ah, need to remember the clothing schedule. You can open it back up in one click without having to click around and get to where you need to go. Pretty cool, right? These, these favorites can have nicknames, as you'll notice that I have. You can rename these to be anything without changing the name of the actual view. One point about this is, again, these are views that are favorited. You cannot favorite an entire list or folder or any of that good stuff. Ooh, actually, let me see. Can a chat be favorited? I think it can. Ooh, way too excited about this, people. Yes. So chat with clothing because it's in the clothing folder. So we can have any view should be able to be favorited up here. And you can have it able to be referenced from anywhere in your business, which is pretty darn cool. So we have that in there. And that's what the Favorites bar is to modify how you use it. You can use the pin to have it kind of. You look more like asana. So if you're used to that, you'll notice that you can have your favorites right at the top of your list and then everything else below it. I think that looks kind of hideous. So I prefer to use the pit approach so it goes across the top. If you have a lot, maybe you want to have them in the sidebar here. You can also straight up hide them so that way they're not blocking your view. But I prefer the top bar with the pin. All right, so that is the very first feature Favorites. Let's dive into another one. So the next one I'm going to go onto is the sidebar. I'm going to move my head out of the way here so I'm not distracting you. Um, I'm going to collapse that and show you that there are multiple ways to view this sidebar. You're probably familiar that this is the place where all your folders and lists live, but there are multiple ways to format it Here I have it kind of disappearing based on where my cursor is. I find that kind of annoying. But if that's. If you need that real Estate on your screen. You can do that just like you can on your taskbar on a PC. But if you prefer to have it expanded, this little green expansion button does the same thing as what the pin button did previously. Not sure why they're different icons, but, you know, it's how it goes. So here we are, we can see that we have this expanded. So now no matter where my cursor is, it stays expanded, which is what I prefer, personally, in my ClickUp. I can also resize it here, which is something you might have not played with yet. If it goes too small, it just gives up on you. So you can resize it if you want to make sure that everything fits on one line. And while we're here, we can click on Sidebar settings, something that not many people start playing with. Sidebar Settings allows you to basically close or expand all folders, gives you that change there, and you can show archived things. But most importantly, you can change the actual size and style of both the sidebar and everything in your ClickUp. Now, this is probably one you haven't played with, and I can't guarantee that this feature is going to be here forever. I think this is more of them testing different interfaces. Yeah, there we go. Just your reminder. But at this point, you can change the style. And so right now, we are in large and modern. I'm going to just change the compact. So it's a little bit. I think I like the compact view personally. Makes it a little bit smaller and tighter, easier for these tutorials. But you can also change the actual layout. So you see here, if you look back at this while I'm clicking between them, you'll see the actual layout of my folders and lists change to look a little bit more like the different renditions of the interface. You can see how even just between those two. So if you're watching this and your ClickUp looks very different and you're wondering, wait, what? Where is she clicking? You know, the icons that I'm seeing here don't look the same as hers. It's probably because you're in a different style. I would expect that this feature is going to go away soon, standardizing it for everybody in the future. But until that point, just be aware of what version you're in. Again, to change those. They're in here under the gear in the sidebar. So that's pretty much it for the sidebar. It's the hub of everything. I'm sure you're playing with it a lot just because you're in it for your folders and lists. So I won't dive too much more into it. Let's collapse that for now in these. Now it's going to drive me nuts by going back and forth. We'll just leave it open. So in these, I'm not going to review them at all. If you're using ClickUp at all, you're going to be familiar with those notifications, those folders, I'm sorry, the inbox and your dashboards. Similarly, these features down here, you, you're either using them or you're not. I don't consider them hidden because they're right there in your face. Again, reporting and portfolios also they're right there. The help is actually an area where I do think it's hidden. I think the help previously in ClickUp maybe wasn't the most in your face, but here it is nonetheless directly here. And I think some of these resources are absolutely fantastic. So if you are looking to help improve the product, if you want to vote on different ideas for how the business or how the how the software could improve, definitely check out these areas, especially the request a feature area. Very, very helpful and very, I think not talked about enough at how great they're continually growing Resource center is. So that's there. I'm going to count that as a hidden one. All right, let's go back. Let's go back to the main area. I'm going to go back to some of the mainstream stuff here. How about over here? What is quite so this is going to introduce two things at once. First, Quick Switch. Second, do you see that there's those letters when I hover over Quick Switch which is kind of clipped off my screen. Let's go over something else. Let's go to this example. Just like Quick Switch, you see how there's those letters in parentheses around like new task for example, there it is at T. So ClickUp has some built in hotkeys or keyboard commands in the software. One of the most, you know, easy to use ones in my opinion is to hover over an assignee and click on M. No shift, no, nothing fancy. Just hover over it and click M and it assigns it to self. Super helpful keyboard command. But there are also a whole bunch of other ones including Quick Switch which when you click K it opens up this jump to location window where you could type something in other pages which is one of my things here. Or you can just toggle up and down to go to some of the most common areas. For example, if we have any docs oh, we have some docs. Yay. Not that many information in your business to find the stuff that you need. What's nice about this is you can filter between different types of information. Conversations means chat, by the way, how you sort by them, and also customize your settings around where you're searching. Very fun. And again, that's the keyboard command S and that's the magnifying glass. That one's not hidden. But maybe you aren't using the keyboard command. Maybe you're just clicking on it. Class it up a little bit and just click S and D apparently. Similarly, the keyboard commands game gets upgraded when you go down here. New task reminders, notepads and docs. All of these things that you're probably familiar with. If you haven't started playing with them, please do. And again, use the keyboard commands to get there if you want to save a little bit of time. One feature I will point out that is here, maybe it's a little bit in your face, but people aren't as familiar with is, is clip. Now, there's one here. I'm going to start one in here. Anytime you are writing in ClickUp, basically you can now record your screen. Think, Loom, think. Exactly what I'm doing right now. But built into ClickUp, recorded audio, all that stuff. I'm actually not going to click on it right now, just in case it stops my current recording. But this allows you to record audio and video or just one or the other, and save it to ClickUp and also download it for other uses. So definitely check that out if you haven't. If you're subscribed to Loom, but you don't use it a ton and you're on the paid plan, save a little bit of money, consolidate and consider using Clip. So that's right here. It's a newer feature, just came out a few months ago. Right there, click. No, I guess it hasn't earned the keyboard command yet. Neither has docs, but it's there. Check it out. All right, so I've talked about a bunch of stuff here. What else do we want to talk about? I mean, none of these are exciting, actually, you know, here's an exciting one. Everything in your ClickUp universe is governed by statuses unless you tell it otherwise. So I'm actually going to highlight the group by feature. Not because it's hidden, but it kind of is. And I think it looks very cool, especially on the Kanban view. Let's see if there's anything. Do we have any good custom fields on this example area. Yeah. All right. So what people don't realize when they start getting into ClickUp, start playing with it, they're not used to the level of customization that comes with the tool. So here we're in a list view and we can see that there's so many pieces of information that we can start using. And one of them is, let's just get. We got design. How's design looking? Design's looking pretty shabby. Let's do brainstorming. Okay, so we've got these custom fields with dropdowns that really look like Monday.com, yeah, they're super awesome. Yeah, they're on the free plan. Super cool. But did you know you can actually use those to organize information? The reason views are called views is because they allow you to view information in different ways. Same information, different way view of looking at it. So part of how you make views truly be different views is by manipulating how they're organized or how they're formatted. In this case, I'm going to group these by design. I'm going to save that for everyone. And now what I've done is I've sorted all my tasks not by the status, which is what they were originally sorted by, but by that stage. I just set in here this custom field, change that to final. And I can also change it this way. It just allows you to actually look at information in different ways. And I think that's a pretty cool. This particular one I feel like is very underutilized. Sort by. Yeah, that's nice. But group by is really powerful, especially in Kanban view. If that's the way you look. Organizing by assignee. Let's just do that other keyboard command. Hover over, click M. Ooh, it's assigned to me. If I were to then sort this by assignee. I said sort. I meant group. I'm sorry for confusing you, but sort by assignee. I said it again. Group by assignee. When I group it by assignee, I'm actually creating columns based on who it's assigned to, which is really fun. And if I were to go in here and change this to be assigned to me again using that keyboard command. There we go. Pretty cool. And I think group by is a really good case, especially if you're someone that primarily works in Kanban, use that Group by. It's really great. Just remember to save. If you do want to save that view. And there we are. So that's another hidden feature. The last one I want to talk about today is really cool. I remember when I first. When I was first playing around, I wasn't looking for anything really. It's just using it for my own use. And I started, I stumbled upon this. This little bubble. And I was like, what the heck's that? Click on it and you unlock this new fancy world. This Multitask toolbar, or whatever you want to call it, is kind of the holy grail of advanced features in ClickUp. It allows you to do things to multiple tasks at the same time with just a few clicks. So you'll see this. It shows up just to get to. It is you hover over any task and you just look for the little. The little bar, the little ball. Actually show you this in another view. Same thing here, except it's in a separate location. So we've selected those two. We can tell that they're highlighted by the fact that they're partially surrounded in green. And we've got this stuff showing up. And every single one of these allows you to alter the tasks you've selected. You can change the watchers for all of them. You can change the assignees to all of them. In this case, we're going to unassign me. Look, now they've all changed Unassigned. Oh, they changed you back? No. Okay, maybe this one doesn't want to work. There we go. All right. Change to unassigned. We can change the status of things. It changes both to the red so we don't have tags on. We can change sub like. We can manipulate so much about these tasks by using this Multitask toolbar. You'll notice some of these I have off and I'll explain why in a moment. Change the dependencies. We can merge the tasks. We can link the task. Kind of like you might be familiar with with Asana. You can change the custom fields. So I know we had a custom field called design here, which we were using for a while. Let's change both of them to working on it. Done. I'll use the example over here. Cause it's easier to see. Let's change a custom field. Or let's change design again, let's change it both to nothing. This is a really handy way to really manipulate a bunch of data at the same time. With this Multitask toolbar. Also, archive and trash and copy to Clipboard. Copy to Clipboard is very fun if you're looking to get this information into a Word doc, into a PDF, into an Excel spreadsheet, or if for some reason you just want to have it handy for your own Reference. Very, very cool. I would consider that hidden. And yeah, let me first and let me take a second here and explain why these certain ones are not working. Click apps. Click apps are functionality basically that ClickUp says it's not essential. You have to turn it on if you want to get it, just so they don't overwhelm you from the get go. Those are set at the space and voter level. Here we are, ClickApps. This space did not have those turned on. If I turn them on now, all of a sudden I can manipulate those extra pieces so there is that. All right, just a few last things to wrap us up here. These are I think obvious but you know, I'm going to point them out just in case they're not. Time tracking is built into ClickUp if you're not using it and you're paying for another tool. I mean stop install the Chrome extension to make sure it works. Watch my other video on how to make sure it's all working well and use your estimates and time tracking in ClickUp or use the integrated time trackers. So in here you can actually see that ClickUp integrates with a bunch of other tools including a ton of time tracking options that will track things sort of perfectly right into ClickUp, which is very, very nice. There's so many more features I could highlight. I mean automations, the list info and where that goes into how that kind of shows up under each area. I mean there's so many little things, but I think this is a pretty good taste test to take you from that intermediate or start taking that beginner to intermediate. I think I'll probably do a part 2 of this video if there's interest. So leave me a comment if you found this helpful. In about 15 to 20 minutes here you've hopefully up leveled from kind of that I'm still stumbling my way around to oh, those are a few cool things I can try tomorrow and if that is the case for you, definitely leave me a comment. Let me know and let me know if you'd like to see a part 2 to this video because I'm sure I can pull out a few other 10 little features to get you excited and help you to start using ClickUp in a more, you know, helpful and practical way. So thank you so much for watching. That's it for this video. Be sure to subscribe. See you.