How to Merge Tasks in ClickUp

So you've added some tasks into your ClickUp account. Congratulations. And now you're starting to think, wait a second, did I already put that idea into ClickUp? Did I already add that video theme? If you are in that situation, you may want to take advantage of a feature I actually didn't realize was there for far too long. And that is the merge feature of ClickUp. What merge allows you to do is take two tasks that maybe have something in common, maybe have nothing in common, and combine them together by basically dissolving one into another. The way it works works is pretty simple, and it's available on every plan that exists, and even guests can use it. All you need to do is locate the task that you'd like to dissolve or merge into something else. The one that you select here is going to be the one that kind of disappears when you're done. So my suggestion would be to pick whichever task has less information than your ultimate destination task. So here I am on my content campaign themes list. I've got a bunch of different themes in here, but as you can tell, two are pretty darn similar. I've got Heart Health and Cardiac Health, and those are kind of hitting on the same ideas. If I left things as is, it's pretty expected that people could come in here, view these as two separate things, and start adding information like connecting to YouTube videos or other things, and not realize that there's actually two copies of the same idea. So I want to clean it up by merging. The way I'm going to do that is to look at the two competing ideas here, Heart Health and Cardiac Health, and compare the information just at a quick glance. Understanding. I have all of my fields visible. I can see that there are some areas where the two of these things kind of fight with each other. They don't have the same information in hashtags. There's a lot of fields filled in on heart health that aren't filled in on cardiac health. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to treat cardiac health, which is generally more blank, as my dissolving task. And I'm actually going to go ahead and specify this in the description just for the sake of clarity here, that this is going to dissolve and then I'm going to go to the other one and I'm going to write a little note to self saying, this is so important, this is never going to resolve. And once I have those two little notes to self, just for demonstration purposes here, I'm going to go ahead and merge to do that, I'm going to use my non dominant mouse button. I'm going to click on Cardiac Health, the dissolving entity, and I'm going to locate Merge from the menu. When I click on Merge, I'm going to see kind of that familiar modal pop up that asks me to select which existing task in my space I'd like to add to. Now I could look at recent or I could type in the word heart, but personally I like to follow the same advice that we do for dependencies and relationships. If you don't know what that quick tip is, you, you can watch the video up here all about those to get yourself a little bit faster on setting up dependencies. Or maybe I'll just tell you right now what I like to do is I actually like to locate my destination task because you're going to be looking at it anyway. Use my non dominant mouse button to copy the link to that task, then go back here and merge. The reason I like to use a link rather than searching by the name is because a lot of the time folks in real workspaces, not demo areas, will have a lot of tasks with the same name. And searching by name and having, you know, a million John does pop up is not going to help you find what you need. So if we use the link approach and just paste that in, we can get exactly the one we want without having to figure out which of the 30 John does we're referring to. So I'm going to paste that link right in here and ClickUp is going to instantly do its magic and dissolve my Cardiac Health month, make it disappear into Heart Health. Notice what happened prior to that merge. We had clearly two tasks and we had different fields in each of the tasks. We had no tags on Cardiac Health, but when we merged them Heart Health, this tag is still there. We had an assignee on Cardiac Health, but when we merged them, that assignee became part of Heart Health, and so on and so forth. The way merging works is any areas of a given task that are kind of long form collections of information, such as a description, you see those combined comments or attachments, and a few other things, subtasks and so on. Anything that's like those kind of collections of information will merge, meaning the history of both tasks will combine and thread together. The attachments of both tasks will combine and attach together. The descriptions, as you see above here, combine together with a little bar to divide them. And that is how merging works. In most cases, if there are situations such as the assignee field where one task has the information and the other task does not have the information. What happens is, as you see here and as what you'd expect, they combine. And so if one is blank and the other one is full, full will win and they will fill out that information with whatever information was on the task. In this case, I had the assignee of Layla on the Cardiac Health task, so it merged right in to my Heart Health task. However, if there are fields where there are differences, both are filled out, but they have different values. That's where it gets a little tricky. Prior to merging these together, I had a Cardiac Health thing here, a campaign idea with the hashtag of cardio. But when I merged them together, you'll notice that right now the hashtag does not reflect that. That's because both tasks had values in them. And whenever that happens, ClickUp is very bizarre. When merging together, ClickUp will always give the destination task prominence. So in this case, Heart Health was what I was merging into. Cardiac was dissolving. And so Heart Health's value in this case of hashtag heart won the competition between the two competing fields, which is why hashtag cardio or cardiac or whatever the hashtag was is no longer here. I want to call that out for you guys because if you are merging tasks, I want you to be very careful about where you put set sensitive information. If you have things in your hashtags, things in custom fields or standard fields, just realize that in most cases, if both fields are filled, you will lose that data. You will be better served putting that information into a description or into a comment or into a tag, something that will merge on top and combine together to avoid the loss of data that will come from merging or if you're in the situations, maybe scanning the merge feature. Now, the one reality I haven't yet shown you is what happens when there's a custom field mismatch or there's a little difference between the two things. So let me show you that real quick. So I'm going to head over to my YouTube list and let's just say I've got more duplicate ideas over here. In this case, let's just pretend that for Some reason this video 2subtask is something that needs to be merged into this campaign. They're hitting on the same thing. So what I'm going to do is start the same way. I'm going to click on this with my non dominant mouse button, I'm going to select merge and I'm going to paste the link of my Heart Health task. So I'm going to go ahead, put that in there. It's going to think, and then all of a sudden my subtask is going to disappear. But before that happens, I see this menu pop up. This modal is telling me that there is a mismatch of custom fields between the new task and the dissolving task. Here it says, what would you like us to do? The reason this is happening is because back here you can see that there are some custom fields on this videos area that do not exist in my Content Themes area. In this case, I'm going to toggle these on to say, hey, I know these are different, but just add this new field into Content Themes. That will apply to the entire content Themes list, but it'll make sure this data isn't lost. So I'm going to go ahead and click Add selected Fields. We'll see that subtasks go away. Head over to Themes and when we look at Heart Health, we see a combined label. That label came from our dissolving task. And if we actually open this up and scroll on down. Yep, we see that context field that we saw in the last list is now popping up here. You can also see the traces of this activity over in the activity details on the right side of the task. If you look closely enough, this will give you a little bit of a history log. If you forget, oh my gosh, why did that task disappear? That's basically how merging works in a nutshell. It merges what it can merge, it replaces what can be replaced, and it adds what is not there in the destination. Other things like statuses and so on are all inherited from the task you're merging into. Permissions are the same way. So just be mindful that when you merge things into it, the dissolving task doesn't matter anymore and that new destination kind of takes over the world for this set of data. Oh, and I should also say right now I'm demonstrating inside the task modal using the ClickUp 2.0 task modal. This is the 2.0 screen because that's all I have at the time of recording. If I go into this, you'll see that handy dandy merge feature, the same thing I showed you from the overview. However, if you are someone who's watching in the future when ClickUp finally releases 3.0, you may be seeing things a little bit different than what I'm seeing right now. For you, just know that the process is the same, but your appearance might look a little different. For example, your tasks might look something like this, and your menu for finding your merge button might be over here on the side or by clicking on Merge. But overall the functionality is expected to remain largely the same into the future. It just might look a little different to get to that functionality. If you have any questions about ClickUp 2.0, 1.0, or 3.0 whenever it's here, feel free to drop me a comment in the comments below. Let me know if this was helpful to you. If you, like me, maybe didn't use this feature as much as you should have, or didn't know it was there for a long time, let me know in the comments. And if you're someone who enjoyed this video and would like to learn more about these kinds of hidden ClickUp features, First of all, we have a whole playlist for you that we'll link up at the top, but I think you'll also enjoy this video I'll put on the end screen next, where we talk about stacking templates. Basically merging information sort of in a cumulative way to allow you to make some really intense templates that are all piecemeal but layer on top of each other to build a really cool workflow that sounds really technical, but it's really not. Check out this video if you'd like to learn more about features like this. Otherwise, thanks so much for watching and enjoy the process.