Learn how to sort your ClickUp tasks by name, due date, assignee, custom fields, or randomly. The video walks through each sorting method step by step so you can organize your task list the way that works best for your workflow.
So here we are in ClickUp and we're going to talk about how to change the order of tasks so that they appear in the correct order. Well, first things first, just to orient ourselves, we are here within the space called clickup101, the folder called all of my four week projects. And there are lists below us and we are looking at tasks right here. But how do we get these tasks to appear in the order we want them to show up in? Well, the obvious choice is to use the sort function. I'm going to clear this just so that we're starting with a blank slate here. But if I wanted to arrange these in a particular order, the default choice by ClickUp is to actually sort them alphabetically. So I can do that using the sort function right here. Click sort and it's going to sort them by task name from A to Z by default. That's what that upward arrow is telling us. If I click it again, it'll do it from Z to A. Something I actually haven't played with before, but I was seeing while I was prepping for this video, is if I click on the the task name while I'm sorting by it, I see these additional options to save an order or. Or clear the sorting. Clear. The sorting is the same as the X. But saving the order is kind of a unique way to make your own custom order and then save it. So that way it's saved as part of that view. But nonetheless, we're going to undo that sorting right now and just delete all of this for now. That is one way to sort these tasks and make sure that they're in the appropriate order. The other way is to sort by other things. So maybe due date is what matters to you. Let's sort by that. Maybe it's assignee. You know, whatever it is, you can see you can sort by multiple things. It's kind of like levels of the hierarchy. So if I wanted to sort by first name or by name first, and see, there's two examples. If I put one as a later due date, I could then sort by due date second. So that way they show up in the correct order. So I could flip those around and as I flip the due date, it'll flip the order of how those two are decided, how the tiebreaker is decided, basically. And I could add additional ones, priority assignee, whatever I wanted to group things by. And that is basically setting the order. Just like with most things with views, if I wanted to save this so that way when I go off of this tab and come back to it. It is still, still here. I want to click Save. Save for everyone or just save for myself. We're auto saved, so it always saves. Here we go. Now we've got all of these sortings saved there. Notice they only stay in that particular view. So list view is now alphabetized in this crazy way. But our board view is still kind of chaotic. So how can we organize our board view in the same way? Come over to sort by. It's slightly in a different location, but go by sort by and select whatever you want it to sort by in the order you'd like it to. Sort of. So if I want to go by task name first, I can go top to A to Z or Z to A. I do that. I could go to. I forget what we had before, but let's say due date next and then we want priority. Then we want assignee. Now they're in this order and I can change them to be A to Z or Z to A clicking on the little teeny tiny arrow. And if I want to delete any of those, I could click the X sign and remove that layer of sorting. When you're creating a task, you also have the option to change the order. So for example, if I was here and I wanted to create a new task in this area, you'll see that I'm creating it in the asana example, which is a part of the section I'm looking at. And there's this little, little fraction looking thing over to the right side that is actually our position in the list. The position in the order first for this specific one, it's talking about the order within this list. So here, if I were to create this testing. Now we were to create that, it's going to show up as the fifth position in the list. If I were to Change this to 2. Let's go. This is 2 question mark. It will create it in the second position. So that's another way as you go. If you want to put things into a certain order just based on an arbitrary measure, you could use those methods Also when you're within a task, we'll see this one. You can see that same task position here and you could go in and change the order that way. I don't know why you'd want to do that, but you can. I could go in here and change this to the first position. Cool. And quickly, before we go, I want to give you one bonus tip about this alphabetical order in ClickUp. Here it is. See my nice little list where I Have each task as a number. Maybe you have this to organize your number of orders or whatever else you might have. Right. You have numbers as your tasks. Here's what happens when you put a 10 into ClickUp. Then I go to alphabetize it. Sort by task name. Do we see what happened there? As you see here, we've got 1, 106, 13. The reason they're in that order is because ClickUp looks at each number individually to determine what order they should be placed in. So it looks at ones, all the ones, and then 0 is before 3. So naturally 106 should be before 13. Yeah. So it's not really great for numerical organization. But one thing that you can do to make it just a little bit easier, and this is just a human kind of retrain your brain thing you can do is add leading zeros. When we do that, I'm going to go in here all of a sudden we find that numerical order works correctly because those leading zeros let ClickUp know what exactly we should be comparing. This one is equivalent not to this one. They are very different units of measure. So adding a leading zero will ensure that your numerical data will be in the correct alphabetical order in ClickUp. But just as a point of comparison, if you add a custom number field, not something that's two text, if you add a number field, ClickUp can actually do the math correctly. So if you are kind of flexible and you don't need that number to be in the actual name of the task, you can ignore the leading zeros tip and just type them directly in to whatever it is that you are creating in a custom field. That is a number field which you can create here by clicking on number. I hope this was helpful to somebody I know this was a question I got from the YouTube channel, so I want to make sure I did a video about it. But that's it for this video. If you have any questions, if you or comments, feel free to leave them below. And if you like this video, be sure to subscribe. 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