How to Predict Capacity in ClickUp Using Workload Views & Dashboards

So you know what you're doing today, you know what you're doing tomorrow. But what about the big picture? When can you take on that next project? When can you onboard that next client? Where's that balance between total overwhelm and twiddling your thumbs managing capacity in the short term and the long term.

I was gonna say big term. That's.

That's not correct. Long term is what we're gonna be.

Focusing on in this video because that.

Exact question came up inside our client community earlier this year. What I'm about to show you is a clip from our members only weekly review. It's our live show we do every single week for our paying clients and in it I'm answering a ton of questions every week that come up about ClickUp process and everything in between. If you are someone who's interested in learning how to use ClickUp to forecast your capacity in the short term and the long term, stay tuned for this answer. I think you'll find it really interesting.

How can I use ClickUp to project our team's capacity? Any projects we already have running inside of ClickUp, so it looks like a bit of context is I was most interested to join to learn about planning for team capacity. However, the template and areas for recurring tasks didn't really help with what I wanted. I really wanted some straightforward ways to track and see the capacity for our team and and the many projects we already have running inside of ClickUp. Currently we are using time estimates and getting better each day. Well, that's always a plus. And our supported teams are usually folders with singular lists inside, mostly inside a communication space. We want to forecast a stress free future for accepting new work and seeing a hot potato moments easily would make life even better.

Love it. So let's map this out. I know this one is actually a fun one because we kind of previewed it. So I actually have two answers for these two different pieces. So I'm going to try to map out each of the solutions here as a visual. I appreciate this person asking this question, but I want to pull it in here because I'm like oh, I feel like so many people would benefit from this that I'm just glad that we're able to go through a full demo. So what we're going to do is first of all replicate their setup so we know communication space next avatar. I wish this would be more streamlined. Moving on, moving on. I just did the fatal error of picking two default views. Please forgive me. Once we have our space we're going to Mock up how they have their clients organized. So this would be client A with one list in it, client B with one list in it, and so on. Once we have these things built out, if we want to be able to see in the moment what people's capacity is, and we also have consistent time estimates, we can utilize views to give us a visual. Now to do this very well, I do need to have a few tasks in here with some time estimates. So let's just humor me as I go in. Add some pieces in here, we'll go inside some time estimates which I probably did not activate in this space. So let's just go add that real quick. Don't rush through the the mock up lay. You always miss the important things. There we go, time estimates added. So we're going to pretend we're just like them. We've got time estimate of four hours on that one. The next task we're going to have two hours. And this is all just replicating the situation. If you have tasks created by a template, which is kind of the go to for any client services business, you want your main services as templates at some point, eventually down the line. So you're not creating tasks in the moment. When you get a new client, you're loading all the tasks with all of the time estimates in there. Once we do that, we've got this kind of result. So we've got tasks, we've got time estimates. If I scroll over to the right and I show those time estimates, your life will probably be a lot easier. And now I want to see where.

Is the moments where someone's got a.

Really heavy load so we can hot potato that task over to someone with a lighter load. I want to go to the highest relevant level for where I organize my work. If it was a small team of say less than 20, I'd probably be looking at the everything level. It's a larger team. Or if we had very strict differences in who's on what squad, I might do it at the space level. For now, let's just assume we're doing it at the space level. Once here, I'm going to create a workload view. This is how I'm going to be able to visually check who has the hot potato, who's drowning, who needs help. If ClickUp behaves, we'll be able to break down what the tasks are, who they're assigned to and so on. How we're going to do this is filtering our timescale to be two weeks or one month, whatever timescale we prefer in this case, I'm going to go with one month. I'm going to make sure my workload is measured based on time, because that's what we use. And I'm going to make sure all of my tasks have due dates, which in my mockup I actually mistakenly did not do. And I'm going to group my work by assignee so I can see how much each person has and at what time. Here we can see this Layla person has pretty heavy capacity and other people, which there aren't any at this point do not. As I adjust my capacity down to say maybe I have two hours per week available, we'll be able to see this go red, orange, yellow, as we achieve our capacity or utilize our capacity. So we'll save that here. So here we see my capacity changes from day to day. Most days I have two hours, then I have eight hours, then I have two hours, then I have eight hours because I work part time. Let's just say, given this, I'm able to see that there's a hot potato moment right here on the 12th. Layla's gonna need some help. Based on these time estimates, this is not gonna realistically get done. So if I click on this, it'll show me what those tasks are and I'll see, ah, task three. That's too much for one day. So I can either spread it out over multiple days until eventually it distributes evenly. Notice that ClickUp distributes everything evenly over the days, unfortunately for us. Or I could just move the task to a different day, or I can move the task to a different person. The are my options. And this would be how I would go about monitoring that like in the weeds capacity on a week to week, day to day basis. I would be using a view like this with each of my assignees here and kind of looking at, oh, shoot, she's going to need help. I'll take that from her. Or vice versa. Any questions on that? Like, Mariah, I'm just going to ask you to speak for like the audience here because I know you probably haven't used this too much either. Does that make sense? Yeah.

So I think I missed. How do you. Did you add. Is it based off of the time estimates that Leila has so many hours per week? Like how does.

Oh, good question. Yeah. So right here we can actually set capacity, which is a really cool feature.

This used to be just per unit.

But now we can break it down by day. And this is where I'm setting. What is the top of the bar? That light green color, I'm setting it by clicking on this Edit. You can adjust this in some other views in some other ways, but I think it's most effective in workload. So that's where you would adjust the overall size of capacity and then in terms of how full is it, that is the time estimate. So on task three, when I set it to be six hours in size, that is how it shows up here.

That's awesome. I don't think I've ever played around with that view.

I want to just throw in a little pro tip on this for anyone who's like, oh, my gosh, setting those time estimates are so hard, which I'm. Rika, I don't think that's you. But for anybody else who. Who can relate to that feeling, like, say you're like, I don't know, it's 16 hours or 32 hours, or maybe it's 50 hours, I don't know. Generally, if you are struggling to come up with these time estimates, your task is too big or. Or you have to figure things out. I mean, there's times where you just have to see how it lands, but a lot of the times when it's really hard to tell what the time estimate is, you're working at too high of a unit. So what I would say if this is 16 hours, I'm like, that's a big task. We want our task to be the size of one work sitting for the most part. So I want to break this puppy down into smaller pieces and put my time estimates on those levels. So, for example, it'd be like draft outline, revise. Each of these I can do in less than 90 minutes, and I can estimate with more accuracy. And these time estimates will feed in to a total for the task. But that's where I would put my estimate so it's more accurate. They all just disappeared, which is fun, but if that makes sense. So if you struggle with the. The volume and size, that would be. One way to go about it is to break things down smaller until they're the size of about one work session per person, which could be 20 minutes for some of us, two hours for some of us, and then you'll find your estimating a little bit easier. So that is that. And that all feeds up into this overall view right here. As long as you include subtasks.

Oh, my gosh, look at that. That is so cool.

It's a really cool view. And, like, hide weekends too, because, like, we all have lives, but. Or we try to. That's Part one, I think, wasn't there part two?

I'm like so enthralled by that entire view. I'm like, that is so cool. Okay, so part two is.

Ah, the big picture.

There we go.

Got it. So yeah, so there's two timescales. That's what we were getting to. We've got the zoomed in of day to day, you know, who needs help today versus tomorrow. But we also need the bigger picture of kind of like what I saw in here about mortgage loans. I need to know, hey, can I take on two more clients this month or do I need to delay them and have them start in 6 weeks? Weeks. That kind of question of bigger picture capacity was the second part of this question. And I think while you could accomplish it in the same way, go up to this level and just zoom out and try for the best by just scrolling a lot, I think it's going to be more effective if we try to use a different view to supplement that bigger picture planning. And the way I suggested it that I just want to share here in case it's helpful for others, is actually a little dashboard that we're going to start from scratch together here and we are going to build a custom bar chart. We are going to look at our communications location. Gosh, this demo space is messy. Please, this is not a real ClickUp account. Don't let yours look like this. This is not me. Leading by example, our X axis is going to be time, meaning across the bottom. We want to show past to future. We want to look at this whole year, which is perfect because that includes the future. We want to look at it by month or week, whatever you prefer. And for our height, our Y axis, we're going to use time estimates. See some similarities here. We're using time estimates as our volume. We can also group by assignee to give us that same kind of look as a workload view. Again, include subtasks. Eh, we'll skip close. Actually we'll include closed because that way it shows us ones that we've already done. Now this is not going to look very interesting given we only have three tasks in there. And as I said at the onset these widgets have been acting funky. But what this should show us by the time we're done is this. Wow, awesome. So it's not very interesting because there's only one assignee. But imagine it would be multiple colors if we had multiple assignees. Well, this shows total per month of how much work is scheduled. So we saw a big dip in February, it would let us know hey, if we have a new client, let them start in February.

Or if it was crazy full in.

January, we might say hey, let's just wait and onboard these folks later.

And we can get more or less.

Granular with this by breaking down the units. So maybe you start clients any Monday. So you're deciding which Monday should this new client be onboarded? This Monday? Next Monday? Six Mondays from now? If we break it down by week, we can look at it with that level of detail. Again, not interesting with such a small data set, but this would be very interesting for those of you who have templates with time estimates, in this case scoping out your projects When a client.

Is onboarded, whether you're focused in on the weeds of being project Manager and managing out those daily tasks, or if you're trying to determine when the next major initiative or rock can be scheduled.

This would allow you to have the.

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