How NOT to Set Up ClickUp (4 ClickUp Hierarchy Mistakes)

After some initial hesitation, you've decided how you want to set up your ClickUp hierarchy. But are you sure you set it up the right way? Asking for a friend My name is Layla. I am a ClickUp consultant and I've worked with literally hundreds of businesses to set up their ClickUp account. Whether it's for a training where we're just kind of tweaking some things, initial setup for a solopreneur or a full build out for a full enterprise team. And along the way there have been some common, common trends, some common mistakes I see all the time when it comes to ClickUp hierarchies. So I wanted to just take a moment in this quick video to give you four of the most common mistakes I see when it comes to setting up your ClickUp hierarchy, which, in case this is a new term for you, is referring to the selection of spaces, folders, lists and kind of tasks and subtasks, the way you basically have your ClickUp structured. Now, as I'm going through today, if you find yourself thinking I am definitely guilty of that one, do not fear, right? ClickUp can be modified, it can be edited, and I actually have a full workshop in the description of this video, free workshop where you can come in and I can actually explain to you how I suggest you define your ClickUp hierarchy to avoid these issues and many other ones that I don't have time to cover here in this YouTube video. So without further ado, the very first mistake I see when it comes to ClickUp accounts is over building. This is where you end up seeing a solopreneur with eight different spaces, each with three folders and 14 lists. And they're coming to me saying something like my team doesn't know where to find things. Or I spend a lot of time clicking around and ClickUp and not a lot of time actually doing the work. Yeah, this is a side effect of having too much work structure. The metaphor I like to use here, the analogy I like to use is think about ClickUp like your closet and it's really great to have some categories, right, to keep your shoes away from your dresses or so on and so forth. But when you start having an individual little teensy IKEA box for every individual pair of socks you have, it can start to do more harm than good. And that is exactly what happens with ClickUp. But unfortunately we keep using the generic ClickUp templates, we keep not questioning things, and I keep seeing people suffering with their ClickUp accounts that have way too much structure for their team. As a rule, of thumb, as a ClickUp user with a small team, let's say you have less than five people. I like to see spaces no more than four. No more than four spaces for a team of four. If you have a team of 50, I like to see no more than eight spaces. And if you have a team of several hundred, well, then we can talk. It might depend a little bit about how you have things structured, but generally speaking, less spaces, less folders and less lists is more. And if you're looking to find out more about why, uh, you might decide to add more structure versus removing it, which is generally my recommendation here, I actually have a free hierarchy quiz which I can also include below. But it's basically a quiz that helps you figure out where in the hierarchy your process should be. And that does outline the logic as to why you might want a folder or why you might not. So again, free quiz. You can check that out if that helps. But the second mistake I see all the time when it comes to ClickUp accounts is too much consistency, which kind of sounds like not a mistake. It sounds like a good thing. And most of the most deadly mistakes do sound like good things. What I mean by consistency here is you are trying to treat everything in your ClickUp, everything that you do, every process that you have, the same. And the fact is, the processes you follow, the clients you have, the things you do, they are not equal. Sorry, they are not equally important or equally complex, nor equally top of mind for you. So if you are someone that has multiple services, do not structure all of your services the exact same way, meaning all of them as lists or all of them as tasks, unless they truly all make sense at that level. Most often. What I'll see, especially with consultants, is we'll have your big tenure clients higher up in the hierarchy than your strategy sessions. Okay, so you might have a big web design build out at a folder level, but you might have a quick website audit at the task level. And that is okay, that's actually the best thing we can do because we're making sure our structure is appropriate for the actual process we're having. Beyond just services, this also applies to the operational departments, the on the business stuff, right? So you being a bookkeeper are going to have a bookkeeping process that's going to be higher in the hierarchy than me as a non bookkeeper who has some bookkeeping tasks. For me, I might have bookkeeping as a task that recurs every month or every week. You as a bookkeeper are going to find that same exact process way more important. And so odds are it's going to end up as a list, a folder, even maybe a space inside your own account. So you see how these start to make differences very apparent. You yet when it comes down to it, I often see people bring over setups from Trello or Asana more than anything else. They bring them into ClickUp and they bring them over the same way they had them in Asana or Trello, which generally means all projects are equal. All processes are equally important. It's either task or board. You know you're in Trello world, or it's either a project or a task. If you're in Asana World and in ClickUp we have more options and we should use them. You are going to have a much more effective ClickUp experience if you are putting things at the right level for what they actually are. Now, the third mistake around the ClickUp hierarchy is related to the first one. So the first mistake was around over building. Mistake number three is under building. And this is where you do not build enough structure. And I will say you probably gathered this by what I said before. This is much rarer. However, if you find yourself constantly changing the permissions of individual tasks or individual lists, odds are you're not using enough layers of the hierarchy. For example, I often see people having spaces with tons of lists or even many spaces with lots of lists. All because they never thought to use folders and they just created all these spaces is because they wanted to have different permission levels. You'd be much better served to have folders use every layer you have available before you jump up a layer. In other words, if your lists are feeling cluttered, add a folder before you add a space. The same time I see some people where they have a list in their account where they're constantly going in there, they're creating a task, making it private, creating a task, sharing it with someone, creating a task, making it private. If you're constantly adjusting task level permissions, odds are you either need to make a template that already keeps all of those tasks private, or make a separate list. Permissions if you guys take the hierarchy quiz I talked about earlier, permissions is one of the best reasons to add more vertical hierarchy. That and custom field applications. So if you find yourself constantly needing to cut back access, stop wasting your time. Make a list that is the CEO list if that's something that you really need to do. Now, mistake number four is probably going to blow some of your minds, especially since newcomers to ClickUp tend to put a lot of Emphasis on the ClickUp hierarchy. But before I tell you that fourth mistake, let me just remind you here. If you've gotten some value out of this video today, take a moment to give it a like leave a comment. Those things cost you nothing. But help this video perform and just consider it your payment for this free content. Yeah, you got a moment, you click the button. I can't tell. I'm just going to keep going. Okay, so mistake number four, the fourth and final biggest mistake that's going to blow your mind here is actually using the hierarchy. If you are someone who is a worker bee, typically you are not the visionary of the business, you are just someone working and you are constantly in the click of hierarchy you are doing something wrong. If you are the visionary of the business and you're constantly in the click of hierarchy, you might be doing something wrong. You likely are, but not guaranteed. The reason I say this is because for most people doing most ordinary tasks that don't involve major Minecraft activities, the ClickUp hierarchy is overkill. You should instead be running your entire day, or at least 95% of it, out of notifications, the new home view, and other custom views you've created. Those custom views can be saved into your favorites. So really it ends up being notifications, home and favorites. You shouldn't have to go anywhere other than that. If you find yourself constantly browsing your hierarchy to look for what tasks you need to do, your hierarchy is broken in a bigger way. Or you just aren't using ClickUp correctly yet. Which is fine. There's just some things that you can do to make your life a whole lot easier. So the reason I want to throw this mistake in here is because so often I say, more often than any other question I get asked, is my ClickUp hierarchy correct? And honestly, if you're using ClickUp correct In the other 20% of ways, the core 20% of features mostly will not matter what your hierarchy is because you won't be in it. The other only real times the hierarchy makes a huge impact is around custom fields, permissions, click apps, and a few other features which I talk about in the hierarchy quiz. So yeah, if you find yourself in it every single day browsing around looking for things, there are mistakes in other places and that symptom is showing up in your hierarchy. But the hierarchy itself is not the fundamental problem. So like I said at the beginning, if any of these mistakes kind of blew your mind, if they connected to you in a way that felt like I was targeting you and you feel attacked watching this video. Check out the links in the description below. I guess you two links I mentioned in this one. Sorry, I'm just throwing them at you. We have the hierarchy quiz to help you figure out where you should be in the hierarchy, helping you walk through those questions you should be asking. And we also have a webinar where I'm walking through every single step that you need to do more of a workshop style than a webinar where I'm talking about how you can set up your ClickUp correctly in the approach that I've used with hundreds of clients. And I'm also actively taking my clicking up community members through. So I know this was kind of an unusual video for us, just kind of talking head, but I wanted to share it in piece that can help you make your ClickUp just a little bit more organized and less overwhelming because ultimately the point of ClickUp is to help us get more done more easily with less stress and you know, in a more enjoyable way. If we find ourselves tormenting ourselves around this hierarchy question, we're never going to get to the actual stuff that is saving us time and money because we're spending so much time worrying about the tool that's supposed to save us time and that's just not a good use of time. So thank you guys so much for joining me here for another video. Thank you. You enjoyed this thumbs up comment. You know the drill. I'll see you guys back here for the next video. Until next time, enjoy the process.