How to Set Up Your ClickUp Inbox and Notifications

In this video, I'm going to walk you through exactly how you should set up your ClickUp notification settings so that you do not get overwhelmed. Probably the reason that you're watching this video is because you might have jumped into ClickUp or another project management system and you forgot to edit your notification settings and you got thousands and thousands and thousands of emails that clogged up your inbox. And so I want to make sure that doesn't happen. So I want to walk you through the best ways to set up your notification settings, to use your notifications and to just communicate better inside of ClickUp. And so let's jump right into it. So obviously the first thing that we need to do to get all of this set up is we're going to first walk through our inbox or our notifications inside of ClickUp. So wherever you are in your workspace, you can come up here to the inbox. If I want to, I can also click I on my keyboard. That takes me directly to my inbox as well. That's if you have hotkeys turned on. So go ahead. If you want to, you could turn on your hotkeys. Those are available in your personal settings. You can turn on your hotkeys. That allows you to go ahead and just click anything on your keyboard to find your inbox there. And so within your inbox you'll see we have a couple of different sections here. The main one is going to be important, which is super nice. This is essentially your most important notifications. Oftentimes your app mentions and where people are communicating with you. In ClickUp before 3.0, it didn't used to be like this. Essentially everything would be in one spot. But now it's split up into both important and other, which allows us to get the most important notifications visible, more visible to us as opposed to having it all in sort of one inbox here. So then you have other, which essentially other is when tasks maybe due dates were moved or things fell over due or maybe someone assigned you to a task. A bunch of different things like that. Just your basic notifications, not necessarily they communication with a team. And so that's really the main difference between the two. In addition, you have your snoozed and cleared. As you can see up here, clean notifications will be permanent deleted from your inbox after the so if you accidentally clear notification that you didn't want to, it'll go to this cleared inbox where you are able to unclear it just like that. As you can see unclear notification there or I can go ahead and click E on my keyboard. So those are the four main sections. If I come over here, we can also filter this down too. So as you can see, wherever I am, if I want to see where it was just assigned to me, mentioned me, or anything that is unread from me, I can filter that down again. You can use your hotkeys, Shift 1 Shift 2, Shift Shift 3 if you want, or I can just go ahead and click on that as well and that's going to filter those down. And so in addition to that, you'll also have the option to clear all. So if I come to my other section here and I want to clear all of these notifications because I don't care about them, I would be able to do that again. Shift E. It's going to show you that I can also click that to be able to clear all of them. Otherwise you can go through these one by one, click on them and go ahead and click this over here or again EMI keyboard and that will also clear the notification just like that. If I do command Z really quickly, that's also going to help me undo that if I accidentally did it. So a lot of different things that you can do inside of your inbox. So now the most important things is actually customizing these notifications. And so in order to do that, there's a couple of different ways you can find it. Either come over here to customize and that's going to drop down my notification settings. Otherwise you can come up here and you can also see notification settings that way. And so what I want to do here, let's go to customize, let's talk through a couple of these different things. This is me customizing my inbox here so I can group by a date if I want to, which I find to be the the most helpful. If I have a bunch in here, it's helpful to group by those specific dates that the notification came to me. If I get some of these to be not reviewing them right away, also sort by newest first, I can also do that, which I find to be helpful as well. Unless you want the older ones to be at the top of your inbox, which I don't typically do that. That's not how email works and things like that. But you can if you want. And then you can also customize the importance of these as well. So basically I'm able to funnel different things to my important inbox as opposed to other if I wanted to adjust those. So if you wanted any of these things like Due date changes or time tracking changes, you could funnel those into your important inbox if you wanted to. And if you wanted to, you didn't want to do that, you can reset to default just like that. And that's just going to put the most important things based off your settings in there. And so that's what I can do. I can also choose full screen or inline. The big difference between that is, as you'll see if I were to come here, click into that. That's going to pull this up full screen. So that's the only notification setting or notification I'll be looking at at this time. Otherwise, if I wanted this just be in line so it's not taking up as much real estate, I could click here. And as you'll see, that's just going to drop it down a little bit, which is great. But as you kind of go through these and maybe clear them, that's going to make it harder to know which one you're actually on. If since there's a lot on here, it could be a little distracting. So if you just want to focus on one notification at a time, it is helpful to have the full screen on, but depends on what your preference is. Other one other thing is keyboard shortcuts until we actually dive into the notification settings. But as you'll see here, basically what I was telling you about earlier, you have a bunch of different things that you can use to make this a little bit faster. So memorize a lot of these shortcuts. It'll help you go through your notifications way faster within your inbox. So like go to all tab, go to Important tab, you can just kind of come through and as you get used to them, you'll be able to go through all this much quicker. So the one my favorites are clearing and unclearing, clearing all snoozing, things like that. It's a great way to make this a little bit faster for you. Obviously, yeah, you have to take some time to memorize all these, but as you kind of keep using them on a daily basis, they become to be a little bit easier. So that's your keyboard shortcuts there. In addition, the most important thing is now the notification settings. So I'll click on this and again I can either get that through there or I can come up here to my menu over here, click Notification Settings. That way it's going to pull up the same exact screen for me. And so the cool part about this is ClickUp actually made this much easier than it was inside of 2.0. Because before you had basically a long list of a bunch of different notifications that could be turned on, turned off, things like that. But now they basically created their own settings or recommendations that you can use and you can just kind of toggle that on instead of having to go through every notification one by one by one. You can still do that by coming here to the custom section, as you can see. But. But you don't necessarily have to do that because they basically grouped up their own sort of notification settings based off of what you want. So you'll see those categories here. But as you can see, a couple of different options we have is the Inbox, which is our ClickUp inbox that I was just walking through. You have email, so if you want to send notifications to your email as well, you can do that. Browser notifications. So basically the notifications that might show up within your browser, if you're using your browser, you could do that so that it doesn't just show up in the inbox, it kind of prompts you as well. But if you get a little bit distracted, you don't want those turned on, you can turn them off. You have mobile, so if you're using the mobile app and you want notifications to go to your phone, you can do that. You also see if you're integrated with one of your chat tools like Slack, I'm able to also manage these settings as well. We won't go through that today, but that's something else that you could do. We have another video on Slack if you want to watch that. I'll put that in the description below. And then you also have a couple general settings down here. So your smart notifications, if you want to delay sending notifications to you, if you do get maybe distracted by that, if you're in deep work, sometimes it's helpful to delay notifications as they come in if you don't want them in right away. But if a lot of things are urgent and stuff like that might not necessarily be smart. You'll see of the option to delay these by four weeks. That might be a little long there, but you do have the option to do that. Also the option to auto watch tasks that you're involved in, I oftentimes will turn this on. I do like to have it on because basically when I'm involved in a task, if I'm leaving a comment there or I'm creating a task, I like to be a watcher on that because that basically is saying, hey, I'm now involved in this process. I like to be notified where things are, but you don't necessarily have to have that turn on. I have the personal preference of I do like it. And you can adjust that as well too, based off of when you want to auto watch tasks. So when you're watching a task that's essentially you're going to be notified on what's happening within that task based off of what you're doing here. I'm saying when I comment. So if I comment, basically I'm bringing myself into the workflow. I when I edit, I'm bringing myself in. When I add a new subtask from parent tasks that I'm watching, I'll be added in. When I create a task or subtask within that also be added in. So you can adjust this however you want. But I like to have all those turned on just because if I'm kind of putting myself into that workflow, I like to be notified of what's also happening. But it really depends on your personal preference. So those are the main things there. Now let's get to the big part of this, which is these notification settings. As you'll see, all of these are going to have a couple different options. We have default, we have focused, and we have custom. If you want to know the big difference between default and focused, click up and I'll put this in. The description below does have a whole thorough guide that walks you through what the difference of all of these is in terms of what's going to go the important versus not important sections of your inbox and whatnot. So you'll be able to read through all of those. I personally recommend default. I think this is a great setting. I don't think you have to go into custom if you don't want to, unless you're like very, very want some of these pushed in, some of these not pushed in. But default works completely fine. So I'd recommend turning that on there. And now email. I recommend we live inside of ClickUp. I believe that your communication and everything should be in ClickUp every single morning. Your daily routine. Your morning routine should be going into your ClickUp inbox to see if there's anything you missed. You should also finish your day closing out all of your notifications in your inbox as well. Cause if we're trying to create a single source of truth, we're trying to communicate well. And inside of ClickUp we should be putting all of that in there and finishing the day with Inbox zero. Because if you have a lot of unclear notifications like you would maybe in an email inbox and you get to that point where you have 400 or 500 unread notifications, that essentially means you're probably not going to go through all of those and it becomes meaningless. So we want to make sure the team has a good habit that every single day they're relying and going into their email inbox and getting down to inbox zero every single day, or if not every day, at least a few times per week. It's super important. So in that case, I actually turn off my email notifications because I don't need them coming to my email. I'm living in ClickUp every single day. It is enough to just have them all in there. Again, this is up to you, but I recommend I don't like getting my email inbox clogged up with a bunch of notifications from my project management system. So I go ahead and just turn this off and I don't even keep it turned on at all. So again, you could disable notifications just like that, unless a little bit different. You do have the option to do mentions only. So if you want any kind of communication where someone mentions you to come to your inbox, you do have that option, but I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to disable those browser. Similar to Inbox you have the option to just do mentions only, which sometimes could be helpful if you only want that notification to come in when someone actually mentions you in a comment, you're able to do that. But I'm fine with the default settings here as well. And you can show an example of what that would look like as well if you go ahead and click that button and then mobile, I actually turn these off as well. I don't feel the need for me to have these turned on. I don't even use the ClickUp mobile app. I keep everything on my desktop. But again, if you want that, if you want to be pinged all of the time, if there's a bunch of stuff that's super important to come through on your phone, you can do that. However, sometimes when I get a bunch of notifications on my phone, it kind of makes work life balance a little bit harder. And then I try to get into involved in the things maybe too late at night or whatever. I find it very helpful to keep these turned off as well. So I like to just really rely on my inbox, keep that as default and I also can have those browser notifications turned on as well. And so that's your Notification settings overall. Now I want to quickly finish up with actually going through and talking about how we can best use this inbox and so the way that I do it again, as I mentioned, you always want to get down to inbox zero and you want your team communicating and relying on ClickUp for their communication, especially when it comes to working on certain projects because if it gets lost within Slack and email and ClickUp in three different places and it's hard to really bring all the breadcrumbs together. So we want to put it all in one place to make it much easier for the team to navigate and ensure that they didn't miss anything or any piece of communication. So the best way to use this and the best way to go through these is again I go into my important I see if someone left a message to me. As you can see here we do have a comment and so you have the option inside of these notifications. I can leave I can see this and I can leave a reaction right here if I want to. I can like that comment. I also have the option to reply directly in here as well. So if I wanted to click reply and I can go ahead and reply to this message, I'll just say thanks just like that. And as you'll see now that's going to show up there. However, I find it easiest and best if I were to come in here and you'll see you have the option to choose your details here so I can open up my details just like this. And so what that does now is it's actually going to bring the whole task side by side with this notification. So that's the task that we're working on. This is where I was actually at mentioned on. But now what I need to do is go to my activity. So the activity is where that comment actually lives. As you can see here, this is actually in a threaded reply just like that. You can see John Smith left a message there. That's what's showing up. And we have this thanks down here that I just left. But again, as you can see I'm only seeing those two. I'm not actually seeing this middle comment that happened there. So regardless, I find it to be a little bit confusing to leave and communicate directly in your inbox. I like to actually open up the details of this just like this, open that up, go to my activity and make sure I'm not missing anything when I go ahead and leave that comment. And so again this is going to be with habits with your team whether it should be a threaded reply or not a threaded reply, however you want to do that. Obviously with ClickUp AI, it's easy to summarize threads and things like that if you want to, which can be very helpful if people are leaving very long comments. But as you can see, it's super helpful to go and open up those details, open up the activity, and then go ahead and just leave the comment there to make sure that I'm not missing anything that I shouldn't be. And so now after I've gone through that comment and I'm good to go again, what I'm able to do is I can actually go ahead and clear this if you want to snooze things, you are able to. If I'd rather do Z, that just puts it over here and maybe I want to check that later on. So feel free to kind of build your own workflow in this however, best you are at reading and answering notifications. However, I find it most helpful to go through this. I answer that message and I go ahead and click E and that's going to go ahead and clear my notifications. And as you can see now I'm at Inbox zero. Congrats, you cleared your important notifications. Good job to me. Then in addition, with my other I basically go through these. These are not near as important. You can kind of funnel through these if you want to. You can clear all of them, but I kind of go through these one by one. Just say hey, that's fine, that's fine. I can just kind of keep clicking E on my keyboard to go ahead and clear those out. So that's your options there. That's how you use your notification settings and use your inbox again. Get these adjusted. Get your whole team to adjust them early on when they get into ClickUp so that they're not overwhelmed by maybe the amount of emails that are coming in or the amount of notifications they're getting. Because you want to build a habit to go through these each every single day. Get your inbox down to zero to make sure the whole team is communicating in one place. And so if you want to learn a little bit more about how to best use a ClickUp notifications and build out your entire system. We we have a whole 50 plus page guide that walks you through everything that you need to know about ClickUp, whether it comes to pricing plans, personal settings, implementing the system, communicating the system, how to best set up tasks and everything that you could ever want. If you want to. I'll leave this in the description below. Go ahead and download that guide. It's going to take you through everything you need to know from ClickUp's first ever and highest rate solutions. Partner us here at Zenpilot, but I appreciate you watching this video. Hopefully this was helpful. Any questions, leave them in the comments below, but I'll see you again in the next video.