How I Use ClickUp as a Small Business Owner & Vetted ClickUp Consultant (A Day in the Life)

Whether you're a new ClickUp user or you've been using ClickUp for a while, One question I get more than any other here on the ProcessDriven YouTube channel and in our membership is Layla. What does a finished ClickUp really look and feel like? What's the reality I can expect if I actually take the time to get my account set up in a process driven way? Well, that's what I want to tell you about today. In this video, I'm going to be taking you behind the scenes in a day in the life of myself. If you haven't met me before, hello, my name is Layla. I am a ClickUp consultant, the content creator here at ProcessDriven, the CEO of ProcessDriven, and also a ClickUp power user. And in all of those different hats that I wear, I think I have a pretty interesting use case for how I marry all of this information inside of my ClickUp account. In this video, I'm going to take you through a normal day in my life, how I use ClickUp in each moment, and what it actually feels feels like for me to organize pieces of my day throughout this one source of truth. In this video, we will be focusing on one day in the life, so I won't have time to go over every single area. However, I did do that over here on Francesco's Keep Productive channel where I actually went through a little bit of an overview of my workspace setup. In case you're curious about that good stuff. Today though, we're going to focus on a day in life, the reality of what I use more than anything else. My day starts around 6 or 6:30am when I am waking up and getting ready for the work day. I do not really have much of a morning routine. I don't really like those rituals, they just feel like they just take a lot of time and have little value for me at least. So I'm usually right to work as quickly as possible. Usually about 20 or 30 minutes after waking up, I'm downstairs and brewing my first cup of coffee. During this whole morning ritual, I do not pull ClickUp up on my phone, in part because the two factor authentication is annoying on ClickUp's mobile app, and another part because I just don't want that kind of detail so early in the morning while I wait for my coffee to brew. I will typically be taking a moment to check my Google Calendar for my events for the day because sometimes I have calls quite early in the morning, but otherwise I'm just waiting until I get into the office in my home office before I log in to ClickUp, usually around 7:15 or so in the morning, I'm heading down here into my ClickUp account, locating my time tracker and starting my time tracking for going through my ClickUp notifications. Yes, I am that person. I track my time. I never used to, but after many many iterations I have started that habit. So I'll start my timer first and then I'll start going through my ClickUp notifications to check for things that I just need to know as an FYI. For example this notice here. Just need to know that this is now available. Gonna go and clear that out and then and so on. I'll continue this for every notification and if there's anything I need to take action on that is not already assigned to me, I'll add it to my tray using the tray feature in ClickUp. After I clear out all of my notifications I will head over into my Missive inbox, which is kind of like our client communication email thingy. It's like Gmail but better. If you want to see more about that, check out this video and here's where I'm going to do anything around supporting our clients or our team who is then supporting our clients throughout the day. The combination of notifications and missive can take anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes each morning because there is a lot of activity and we've got team members in multiple time zones. But this is by far the most important ritual of my day. If I did not do these things, I don't think ClickUp would work nearly as well for us because right now my team, at least here at ProcessDriven, we are not using any internal slack or message system outside of ClickUp. I'll talk more about how we get away with that later on, but notifications is a key component in making that at all possible. Once I clear out both of these areas inside my ClickUp account, I'm heading into home to actually start my task list for a given day. Usually at this time I will try to prioritize everything and I'll also compare it to my actual calendar in this planning view. I'm going to be sitting there looking at my day, my task list and start looking at if there's anything I need to alert people about. Now hopefully I have looked ahead enough that I have made my workload manageable, but if there's a risk because of last minute meetings that something's not gonna get done today, I'll shoot off some messages before I even start anything. So folks Are aware. So let's say it's around 8am and I'm ready to work on my first task of the day, which is generally another team related thing which is gonna be prepping for a team meeting. This is a really common task I have because we have quite a few meetings and we have a very like agenda first approach to meetings to make sure that they're a valuable use of time. So that means team good amount of prep before each meeting happens. The way we manage meetings in ProcessDriven is actually inside our ClickUp hierarchy. We don't use Google Docs or any of that stuff. It's inside our operations area, inside our teams area. And then we have this meetings and notes, I don't know list structure spot. Inside this particular list we have two views, meetings and meetings calendar. And basically we use tasks inside ClickUp to represent a meeting. If I go inside this sample task here, you can kind of get a rough idea of what this looks like. Basically every meeting is a task with its agenda and notes inside the description of the meeting. You can see all these different sections we have during our normal meetings which are all filled out beforehand so that the meeting can flow really smoothly. The most time consuming part of every meeting is the to discuss section, which takes up usually about 75% of the meeting itself, which is just identifying discussion points that we need to figure out and solve in the meeting. It's a little bit like a level 10 meeting really. But what my task would be for a given day would be in the prep piece. So if I scroll down here we actually use subtasks for each meeting to remind us to prepare for each meeting. So here you can see my subtask and it's just reminding me to go into the parent task and fill in my stuff. It gives me some guidance as to what to fill in and it just reminds me to do it a day before the meeting itself. Oh, and I want to jump in with a quick tip from our sponsor of today's video, textexpander. If you aren't already aware, textexpander is a software that allows you to save predefined snippets or steal them from other people and then use them in your writing wherever you're at. So you can have long form text written out without you having to manually type it or manually go find that information. A fun use case for textexpander is actually using their emoji cheat sheet public group. This is basically some predefined snippets that textexpander loads into it that you can add into your text expansion account. What this does is allow us to just type this little gray word inside the right sidebar there. So in this case ocean. And as soon as we type that and make a space, it'll automatically swap it out with the snippeted information. So for example ocean. There we go. If I want to do stars, There we go. If I wanted to do volcano. If I can spell volcano, there we go. It automatically swaps out my text with the emoji that I am describing. This is really handy if you want to use emojis inside say your ClickUp view names or if you want to have emojis in your notion page or you want to have emojis in your emails and you don't want to constantly be finding them or browsing emoji keyboard this basically replicates what you're used to experiencing on your phone by being able to write things in and just have them populate inside your account. That brings me to my second task of the day, record and upload Shorts work session, which is a bit of a mouthful, but really all this is is a reminder for me to go in and get ahead on the production of short form content we're trying to produce here at ProcessDriven. In fact, if you haven't noticed, this is a great reminder to subscribe to this channel because we are producing a ton of short content around things like ClickUp and process and other systems that might help save you time. So if you don't want to miss these things, be sure to subscribe. How I actually do this task is this will pop up on my screen, I'll hit play just like I said before and I'll go inside the actual Shorts creation list. If I go into that shorts list, you'll see what we have organized. This list is actually a list inside our secondary content folder which is basically where we house all of our non YouTube videos. Really our non blogs non YouTube goes here and it's inside our lead gen and fence shaking style. So this is kind of like our sales and marketing area really. Once we are inside here you can see that each piece of content is broken out as its own task. Inside this list, our social engagement coordinator is creating content ideas based on your comments on YouTube videos like this. So go ahead and drop me a comment if you want to see your stuff on here. And when she does that by using the form right here, it automatically adds a production template to each task. So so just to show you what this looks like, we've got our short form prompt, we've got the template being added and the assignee being the social engagement coordinator. Every time one of these items is filled in, as it's been done 74 times in the few weeks that we've been doing this oh my gosh, let me just scroll down to one that is relatively new. You can see what the template looks like Here we have a question from a person on YouTube asking would it be easier to link a task versus whatever else we were talking about in that video? If I scroll down, you'll see the full context here and the three tasks involved. I always kick off these processes and I'm given a one week timeline to get this content out and whenever I finish my task, the dependency that's set up here automatically assigns the next task in the chain. This is all happening via an automation, so my task really is just to focus in on this first subtask and clear the way for the next steps to be done. The automations inside of ClickUp actually make sure those feature steps are done by using these magical things such as when task is unblocked, post this comment and add a start date and a due date. But of course, as a ClickUp geek, I'm not going to be going into this view and browsing through all the subtasks to find my stuff. And because I have a separate routine, I'm not going to wait until this due date arrives. Nope. I have a view for myself called Just Recording Tasks that is filtered by the recording video. Task title shows subtasks separately and just shows me my subtask. So if I start working on how do I feel about SOP writing tools, I can move that in progress and closed in this simple kanban format. Typically the next thing I will have on any given day is more meetings. Particularly on, you know, those busy days of the week where I try to batch all my meetings together. So I'll probably have a meeting with my operations lead, I'll have a meeting with the CX team, I'll have a meeting with the leadership team. Just meetings, meetings, meetings to make sure that we cluster them all together and keep everyone on the same page. This meeting flow all follows the same rhythm and all note taking including my personal notes end up on the same task. If I'm in a meeting and I actually have like a quick action thought that I need to capture and process. It's almost embarrassing to admit, but the way I actually do this is by opening my trusty notepad. Yep, I know this is the lowest tech thing that I ever do, but it just works. I have a stream deck on my desk so I can click one button and open a notepad page pops right up on my screen and here's how I will track notes for a given meeting. I'll have something like Task take out the trash so if there was a task discussed in the meeting and I will have idea if there was an idea thought of in the meeting such as find a new trash can. Anything else I have to discuss based on those meetings I will just type up as notes, usually with bullet points and I will paste all of those notes into the meeting itself in the comments and the ideas and tasks I will then break out and sort immediately after the meeting or at worst at the end of the day. One thing that's weird about me, I think perhaps compared to most people, is that if there is any task from a meeting, whether it is a 10 minute task or or a 10 hour task, I will always always always add it into ClickUp. This is something I was really lax about in the early days, but I have found so much value in logging this, even if it only takes me a few extra minutes to finish the task so I have that centralized history later on so I can look back and say hey, where did my time go? What could I delegate in the future? This is so informative that it is worth the time in my view to create the task quickly. By the time we work through all of that stuff, it's usually around lunchtime and it's time for my snack break. So I'll be right back. So we are back from our snack break. We are sustained and it is ready for our next task of the day and one that I just had to do this morning that I thought would be a perfect example of what your task list might look like is this one popping up inside my tray slash home. This is a task that was assigned to me by the OPS lead who asked me to create an SOP for how to add a countdown timer to the website. It's something that I have always done. Takes like two minutes. But I've never written an SOP for anyone else to do it, so it was my reminder to go ahead and knock this out. So here is the task that we see broken out here with the CARS method, which again if you guys want to hear me talk about, just let me know. But basically I need to create an sop. So what I'm going to do is head over into our SOPS area and get to work. How we organize SOPs at ProcessDriven is with a task based approach, meaning every task inside this SOPS list represents one sop. I know this isn't for everyone, but if you want to figure out why we use tasks instead of ClickUp docs, just watch this video up here. My views have not changed since the time of publishing that, despite some of the updates that have come out. Not going back to docs anytime soon, but what we have here is basically a task repository where each task is an sop. Inside this sop, I've basically written out the basic purpose of a given task, the inputs someone needs to be able to complete this recipe or SOP Standard Operating Procedures the technical term, but I just think recipe is easier and I have three basic steps. As a little fun fact for any geeky leaders out there, I actually report on this SOP and the relative quality of each of those SOPs inside of my ClickUp account using a dashboard actually let me just show you real quick. This is by no means something I'm checking every day, but every quarter I'm definitely going in here and looking at our overall systemization growth over time based on those tasks I created in the other list I just showed you. So today I contributed by adding one more. But what I'm trying to look at here is the combination of our SOPs, our documentation, our wikis, how are they growing over time and in what condition are they. This particular chart here is just showing me the net total, the overall number of tasks I have, which is one useful metric, but it's supported by various others on this dashboard to help me understand how systemized we are at any given point in time. The next task that might be on my plate on any given day is a manager review for a session. You guys might not know, but ProcessDriven has actually been developing our own in house coaching and ClickUp consulting program. Over the last six months or so we've been training up coaches and figuring out different ways to scale scale what we do and we've just released it actually this week to our members. The opportunity for folks to book one on one consulting with process driven coaches. Building out this program has been a massive amount of work, not only for the coach that's gone through the program so far, but also for myself to figure out how to teach and how to structure all that. So I'm just going to briefly show you how exactly we're organizing this to explain the context of this given task. So when it comes to consult nclik, we've actually created three three different lists inside Our process driven membership area inside ClickUp to organize everything. PD membership, if you're not aware, is our membership. It's how we work with people to set up their ClickUp and systemize their business ultimately. And these first few lists, if you've watched any of our older videos about organizing course and membership content, that's what these are. They're the same templates we provide to clients. They're the same ones we use ourselves. But below them we. We've created three lists for this new program we are developing. Inside this list we have a task for each coach to self review their own performance on a given coaching call. And there's also a subtask which is what the symbol signaling here for myself who is the manager to review that session. We are currently doing this for every single session that we deliver because we're crazy and also because I just believe that every coach and consultant has a space to improve. And as someone who started off as a solo process driven ClickUp consultant, I, I had learned the hard way, you know, I had to learn from clients being disappointed or not, you know, getting what I was trying to explain. And now that we have a coaching team that we're building, I really want to jump them through that learning curve. And so any feedback I can share or vice versa, it's only going to make the whole program and each other stronger and better. Both the person giving feedback and receiving feedback are going to learn something from this process. And, and so this is how it goes. We've got a template that loads automatically into the task description to guide me through giving this feedback. I then type in the score and any notes that I want to share and then I'll submit this task to share it with the given coach. How this looks in ClickUp is having this self reviews list inside our PD membership area. And I should also say we do have a feedback area for our client feedback as well. That's a separate area though because we want to have separate custom fields. How this one works is we have a form that goes out to our consulting clients asking them questions about how their experience was. We have those requests go into tasks in ClickUp and then every time a task is created from that form, we actually have an automation automatically assign a comment to remind the coach to process that feedback, which also has its own process of turning feedback into either testimonials, constructive criticism, ideas or something else. This is an SOP linked right here. And now that I'm saying this all out loud, this is probably very overwhelming, but hopefully it's also interesting as well. Finally, we've arrived at the end of the workday and usually if I am lucky and I play my cards right by the end of the day, I usually have an hour or so to spare for something that would be a little bit more fun. I like to end my day in a happy way or an enjoyable way. And usually that ends up being on something like big picture planning budgeting, which is weirdly big picture or content creation. Something like that is usually how I'll wrap up my day. And so in this particular case I'm working on the budget piece. This is something I actually have to work on today to get wrapped up for the next year. And I want to show you how I do this just at a high level because I think it'll be interesting. And this is an area that I've been doing a lot of evolution lately Inside my ClickUp account. I think you can watch my older videos where I talk about goal setting where I'm using a more basic task structure. But the way I approach budgeting is all from a goals perspective. I want to figure out what we're trying to accomplish and then whether we want more or less profit to get there. I think something I didn't realize early on as a business owner is how sometimes profit is not what you want, which seems obvious now, but at the time felt like what? Why wouldn't I want profit anyway? So that's kind of where I'm coming from here. And the way I organize this is inside our new ish Strategy and leadership space Space inside of ClickUp Inside this area I have three folders which are pretty fun spots to be in. They're enjoyable for me to explore. The first one that I want to highlight is the Goal Setting and Company Goals area. This is where I'll be setting the company wide goals for the next year. So here are some of the ones that we have on the CX and OP side of things. These company goals here are really more of a database. It gives me the basic structure and allows me to assign them out to key people on the team and I can also then relate these to product projects that we've decided we want to do in order to make that happen. This project goal connection is using a relationship field in ClickUp and all of our actual projects are housed over in this growth projects area here. And this brings me to the overall folder of Path to achieve goals in here. I have a timeline view in ClickUp where I'm actually going to kind of keep track of what the vision is for the major projects in the company. While I love the fact that we have so many routines in the business that we've systemized the hell out of, to me these growth projects, these initiatives, these are the things that keep us pushing forward and where I need to spend most of my time and energy focusing in on making sure they happen and making sure they feed in to the day to day work. So here is where I will be going to plan the actual budget for the next year, pop that stuff into a spreadsheet or into QuickBooks to make depending on where I want to organize it this year and really just focus in on what we need to have happen and when. As I'm going through this, if I feel like things are kind of off, I need to adjust timelines, I can adjust them here throughout the whole next year, which we have mapped out thanks to some strategy planning we've done earlier in the year. Finally it is the end of the day. Are you tired? I think I'm tired. And with that we're going to start my end of day routine, which is just the same exact thing as my startup day routine. Notifications, missive, clean out my tray, make sure all of my tasks and ideas are processed, and then look at the day ahead to make sure it all feels reasonable. So that's how myself as a ClickUp consultant and power user uses ClickUp every day to organize my everything. And if you want to dive even deeper into any of the areas I've kind of glossed over today because I know this was more of an overview and not so much a piece by piece everything kind of tour. Please do check out the description of this video where we're going to link to the related tours we've done and the deeper dives on certain areas. Thanks so much for for watching today guys. I hope this was interesting. Let me know if you enjoyed this by liking and subscribing and until next time, enjoy the process.