How to Organize Your Software Stack in ClickUp

Hey guys, I want to pop back with one more video. It should be a pretty quick one. Just talking about how I'm organizing the software I have in my business inside ClickUp by using tasks as something other than tasks. Let me just give you a sneak peek here. This is what we're looking at here. And basically what's involved in this is just having each task and I say task with like quotes around it. Each task in ClickUp equals a piece of software. And then we use custom fields and descriptions in order to document how to how exactly that software fits into our overall strategy or our overall business. Why I really like having this database and why I decided to build it inside ClickUp is because I wanted to be able to connect the automations that we're tracking inside ClickUp with the people who have access to the software and kind of bring it all together using relationships inside ClickUp. And if you haven't already watched the video talking about how I'm using relationships to track my automations in ClickUp, well, watch that here because it's kind of, I don't know, it's not a part one, but it's not a part two. It's kind of like a companion piece to the video you're watching right now. Again, here is the template for where we're tracking all of these software in our business. It's not very complex when it comes to custom fields or views because we don't need a lot here. The most important role it's playing for me is just helping us remember. So the title of the task is the software that we're using. The link is just a link to log in or access that software, which you wouldn't think is important, but as we've added more people onto the team, just them keeping track of all the tools we use, we let alone how to log into them. Turns out it's important. So this is kind of helping us keep everyone on the same page as to what the login URL is. Cost and plan. I was hesitant whether or not I wanted to track this, but because I can do some calculations here inside ClickUp I thought it'd be kind of interesting to be able to see at a glance without having to go into my accounting software just how much we're looking at spending, especially when some of the monthly and annual subscriptions are coming up for renewal and maybe I just want to be able to see them in one spot. So this is just a money field inside ClickUp which is for cost. Next up we have plan. This is A label field in ClickUp, which is kind of like a multiple choice sometimes, very rarely. We might have something where it's monthly but it's also free, or it's free as an affiliate, but it's also annual. So those kinds of things. I just thought a label field made sense and these are our options. We have here lifetime deal, meaning we bought it once and we get it forever. Monthly, annual, included in something else that we've already purchased. Free as an affiliate or free just you in general. We're on the free plan. Next to that, we have software access. This is showing us who has access to that piece of software. Now for me personally, as someone who's managing a team, this is still kind of a new adventure. For me, the management piece, especially Software Access, isn't something I thought was going to be that big of a deal. Of course I'm going to remember who has access to Google Drive and who has access to ClickUp and who has access. Let me be honest and say that it is a lot harder than I thought. This was actually the field that I almost designed everything else around really. I, I started creating this just because I really wanted to keep track of who has access to what software. So when someone leaves or they're fired or they're promoted or whatever, we knew exactly what tools they needed to have access to to pass that job along to the next person. So this guy is a relationship field. The name of the relationship is Software Access. And if I go into the edit, you'll see all it's doing is relating my humans list, the list of people in my company to this area that we're at now. Software. I didn't even use any rollups or anything. I'm so, so basic. But all it does is when I click in here I can add to connect the softw people in our team and there they are there. So you can see Alex and myself are both have access to Integromat at this point in time. So this next one is one that I never really thought would be that important, but turns out it is. Again, once you grow, there's a lot of little things to keep track of. These are our affiliate relationships. So if we have an affiliate link for someone, we'll make a little pretty redirect link. So hey, while we're here, if you guys want to use Integromat, use our link. And since it costs the people who use it nothing and we get a small commission for it, it's never been a real source of revenue for us in any meaningful way in the past, but I'm hoping one day in the future it will be. So we're trying to keep all those organized here. So that way whenever someone reaches out and says, hey, what was that really cool tool that you were using for your automations? We can say, hey, it's Integromat. And then they'll ask us, you know, do you have a link for that? And we say, here you go, we have these links ready to go. So that way myself or anyone working support can just grab the links and drop em in, you know, the Facebook message chat and we're good to go. Next up we have two more Automations and these really do tie into that companion piece, that companion video of how we're documenting Automations. Basically these are connecting these software back to Automations that are set up in our business and we use quite a few of them. We're continuing on that journey. But these two columns say what Automations is this tool involved in and what Automations is this tool running or creating or in charge of, if that makes sense. And the reason I want to have this is because eventually our tools are going to change. It is possible that we will leave ClickUp in the future. It's possible that we'll leave Google Drive in the future. It's possible. I mean any of this stuff is possible, right? And so I would be ready for that before we need to be ready for that. And that comes down to documenting these kinds of things. For example, one day I might be looking at my budget and I might be deciding, is Integromat really worth it? And then I look at this chart here and I see that it's running, you know, 20 of our automations, so saving us hundreds of hours a month, then I'm going to realize it's worth it. At the same time, maybe I have ClickUp on here and one day we decide, you know what, ClickUp's over, we're not into it anymore. We're going to switch and start recommending a tool that feels like it's better aligned with us. If that happens, we want to be able to know exactly what we need to recreate, if we want to switch away from ClickUp. And by having this documentation ready before we need it, we are perfectly poised for any kind of swaps in our tech step that we might need to do in the future, which is so important, especially if you're committed to using the right tool for the job, even if it's not the tool that you're currently using. You can see Here inside the task we actually have a sop. So these are just three basic sections that we have for every single piece of technology we have in the company, which is our internal tech stack template. This involves three very basic sections of purpose, procedure and FAQs. For a lot of these we have kind of a more detailed instructions based on how we actually use it. Things like how do you log in for the first time, how do you get yourself set up. But at this point in time we're keeping it very simple for new tools, just so we don't over commit or over document before we're sure that something's settled in. But the key elements of this piece, just so you understand how this is created, we have a table of contents here at the top. That's what this guy is doing. Then we have just some text with some headers. So this is heading one, this is a table with some text. This is a collapsing toggle area which again you can just create all these by just typing the slash. And this is just a formatted description. And this is where the SOP is going to live as we evolve. I'm a big fan of toggles for SOPs, just to keep things nice and simple, but you can organize it however you'd like. Unlike our automations area and our human sops, this is definitely not a top priority for me in terms of documenting very clearly. I would say most of the time for the software wikis, we're living inside this area of FAQs and someone will write the answer and then they might even just tag themselves so that people know that they're the ones that wrote it and delete their name there. Because besides core tools like ClickUp, a lot of this stuff isn't super confusing and most of us already know how to use in some life or another. So we haven't taken a whole lot of time to document it at this point yet over setting the foundation so that we can do that when we are ready. Inside this list, as I've kind of already talked about here, the only automation we have going on here is that when task is created, apply a template. Basically we're always applying that internal task description to every single task when it's created inside this area. No exceptions, that includes subtasks as well, although we don't have too many of them. And yeah, that's pretty much how we're organizing all the software in our business inside ClickUp. By having a task equal a piece of software, the description equal the wiki article about it, and quick access links and relationships from left to right to help us organize how this piece of technology ties into our overall process goals or our overall vision for the company. Now I have a similar structure set up for the automations that we use in our business, which I already talked about. It's probably still linked above or linked in the description if you haven't already watched it. And we also have something similar for the people and the vacation time in the business. So in a pass it back to you guys. Balls in your court here. What would you like to hear about next, if anything? Right? If you'd like to hear more about how we're organizing people using a people database inside ClickUp, go ahead and write the word humans in the comment below. I promise it won't be too weird to have a bunch of strangers just write human in the comments. And if you'd like to learn more about how we're organizing vacation time, which is again kind of a human thing, but sort of a separate issue, that kind of calendaring issue by again using ClickUp as a database to manage time off requests and all that good stuff, go ahead and write vacation in the comments below. That'll help me know which which video to focus on releasing next. Thank you guys so much for watching. And once again, if you enjoyed this video, give it a thumbs up. We're back here with another video every Wednesday and Friday for Forever and beyond. So if you have any questions or thoughts, drop them in the comments. Until next time, enjoy the.