How to Use ClickUp for Project Management in 2024

Are you looking to find the best project management system for your business? Maybe you're coming from Monday.com, asana, Trello, Jira or the thousand others that are out there and you're looking to see whether or not ClickUp is right for you. Well, in this video I'm going to be going through an overview of ClickUp, the pros, the cons, how you should use it, and walk through a live ClickUp workspace so that you can see what it looks like when it's fully implemented. All right, that's enough with the chit chat. Let's go ahead and get started and jump right into ClickUp. All right, so obviously the first thing we need to start as we go on this journey is how do we actually set up and create a ClickUp workspace? And so that's pretty easy. All you need to do is go to the ClickUp website. I'm sure you know that. Just go here and click on Get Started, it's free or go ahead and click Sign up here in the top right corner. So as you know, you can start for free. You can be on the Free Forever plan for as long as you want, but as you add new team members and need some advanced functionalities within the tool you'll probably want to upgrade. You'll see all the pricing structures here listed out in all the different plans as you see here the Free Forever best for personal use, but you can go to the unlimited business or enterprise. You'll see sort of all the features that's included in each of these different plans. However, if you need some additional insights on what plan is going to be best for you, we do have an article up on our website how to choose the right ClickUp pricing plan that'll take you through sort of the different plans and sort of what is the big upgrade when you do upgrade to that plan. So think about the amount of automations that you might need as a team. The enterprise plan is going to have way more than any other plan. In addition, there might be things like conditional logic and forms that you might need or custom capacity within a workload. This article will take you through all of that as well. So you want to read through this. I'll put the link in the description as well as in the top right corner of this video so that you can go ahead and read that to kind of determine what you're going to need as you get started out. But highly recommend if you're just kind of testing it out, trialing it. I'm trying to Figure some things out. Just go with a free forever plan for now until you start inviting the rest of your team. So in addition to that, once you go and actually sign up for ClickUp just like this, you enter your work email. It'll take you through a process, and once you go through that process, you'll have your workspace all set up and ready to go. As you can see here, I'm Dunn or Mifflin. That's just what I named this for now. But we'll have basically a blank canvas here for me to do a lot of work to edit and customize it to make it work for my team. There's one thing to know as you get into this or a few things. But yeah, as I mentioned, it's a blank canvas. A lot of options to customize it. That's really the pro, but can also be the con of ClickUp is the ability to customize it so much. You can really build a ton of different solutions, but if you don't really know what you're doing, it can be very difficult to build it correctly for your team, especially if you miss a few things when it comes to the hierarchy and views and custom fields and how that all works together. But that's why you're watching this video. I'm going to walk through how, how that works and so also show you a live ClickUp workspace to show you what that looks like when it's actually implemented here as well. But what you're going to want to do is once you jump in here, you want to make sure you go through your settings here and just customize a few things. You can kind of go adjust some colors here. You can adjust your preferences too. Like if you're a dark mode person, you can turn that on. Do you want hotkeys on which One of them that I love is clicking T on your keyboard. That allows you to go and create a task very easily. So hotkeys can be great for some people, but some people, they don't want to use them because it can get a little messy when they're typing on their keyboard and also a hotkey pops up and they go to a different spot in their ClickUp workspace and they didn't really want that. So you'll be able to go through these settings here. You'll also be able to invite the rest of your team. If I go to this people tab, this gives me the option to manage the people in my workspace. I can invite by email either a member, a guest, or an admin you'll be able to add guests. You have free guests here in your ClickUp workspace. I think it's about five per member within your ClickUp workspace. So remember, each member that's in your ClickUp workspace you'll be paying for, but they'll add on an additional five guest seats for you there as well. So guests you can be used for, freelancers or contractors that you're working for, or any of your clients that you want to kind of invite into your workflow there as well to communicate and collaborate with them inside of ClickUp. So go ahead and add some people if you want, or you can start building this all by yourself and then get your team in here after that. In addition, I would also highly recommend you go through the Click apps here, because these are things that people don't fully realize are a part of ClickUp once they first create their workspace. And what these are are basically additional features that can be turned on or off inside of ClickUp per space, like location within your workspace, or just for the whole workspace. So things like time tracking, that is a click app that can be turned on or off. So if I go here, type in time tracking. You'll see if you want to track time and ClickUp, you need to make sure that this is turned on. So if you don't want to use Harvest or Everhour, another tool, you can track time natively instead of ClickUp. So make sure you go turn that on. Same thing for time estimates, if you want to be able to view that for workloading capacity in the future, you want to make sure time estimates are turned on. Other things in here, like Pulse, which is a great one to kind of see who's active across your team inside of ClickUp there as well. Also, just email is another great one as well. So if you want to turn that email on so that you can actually email out of ClickUp tasks, you only have a certain amount of emails that you can actually email out of ClickUp. But if you have a support email or something like that, you can email directly out of ClickUp with that ClickUp. So there's a bunch of other ones to turn on as well. But I would go through and just look at this and kind of evaluate, do we need this right now? You can always turn these on later on. And I always say start simple and then kind of work your way up so that you don't get overwhelmed by everything. So go through all of that, make a decision of what you need turn on or off and then kind of go through and add some things as time goes on. But you'll want to go through all of these settings. Other things to go through are going to be your notifications here as well. So you want to go down to your personal settings down here, go through your notifications and just make sure, like, as you can see here, I probably don't need all these email notifications turned on right here. So I want to make sure I go through these and turn them off. You'll always want to have them going to your inbox because we should be living out of ClickUp. But this is the biggest thing for people is they don't, when they get into ClickUp, they don't adjust their notifications. And you used a project management system before, you'll kind of realize that if I don't edit these, I'm going to get so many emails and it's just going to clog up my inbox. So just make sure you go through and just get rid of probably most of these email notifications. I don't use any of them. I typically will just turn these off right when I get into my workspace because otherwise so many emails, it gets very tiring and you have to kind of go and archive and delete all those. So just go. Otherwise you'll be just too many notifications for you to actually make sense of any of them. But the inbox is going to be the native sort of ClickUp notifications that you'll want to have turned on. So that way you can use ClickUp as where you get the notifications to see everything and make sure you don't miss anything. So those are a few things you want to do personally inside of your workspace. But now let's start to kind of talk about everything else and how this is actually set up and built here inside of your workspace. So the first thing to take note of here is going to be the hierarchy. The ClickUp hierarchy is one of my favorite things, the way that they've designed it, because again, it's very customizable, but it works so well with views inside of ClickUp that if you're trying to build a system that if you think about multiple levels in your organization, so whether that's your individual contributors, then maybe you have some project managers and account managers, and then you have leadership. If you want to create different levels in that organization for them to see work across certain places, departments, whatever it may be, you want to make sure you build your hierarchy to fit that, because you can Layer on hierarchy with your views, which is super powerful, which I'll show you what that looks like when we actually get into a live workspace. But let's dive into what the hierarchy looks like here inside of ClickUp. So in ClickUp the highest level is going to be your workspace. So my workspace as we went here is Dunner Mifflin. And the way to see everything across my workspace is to go here to the everything level. So the everything level or workspace level, whatever you want to call it, this is where I can see work across all of my workspaces. You'll see there's already views here, which are button to views next. But that is the workload or everything level inside of ClickUp. So again, that's across your whole business, across your whole workspace. After workspace, you then split it up into different spaces. And the way that I look at spaces are going to be departments. So if you can think about this, this is a space which if I go into my live portal here, these are my spaces here I have delivery, I have growth, I have operations. We have a few others down here, but we won't talk about those right now. So growth, that's a space. Delivery, that's a space. Operations, that's a space. Each of these are sort of departments within my organization. So as you can see here I have my space as well. So within spaces, again, those are sort of our higher level departments. We then have folders and lists. So the reason I mentioned both of those together is that a list can live on its own, but a list can also live within a folder. So if I come back here to my Dunner Mifflin, I have a folder here, I have a list there, but I also have a list within this folder. And so the way that I use folders are going to be for service categories and then lists will kind of be sort of the service lines or, or work categories within that service category. So just kind of a way to break it down even further. So if I go here to my live workspace, I'll see I have growth. Growth is really our sales and marketing department, right? So now I have marketing and I have sales and then within marketing I then have website content and email. Within sales, I now have prospecting and deals. So you kind of see how that's broken down. Again, we have our higher level department in that department. We then kind of have the service categories per se, or smaller departments within a larger department. And then when each of those we kind of have the work categories. Within that as well. So again, you can categorize this as much as you want. Break it down even further. Again, all that just kind of plays into the views that you'll want to build and create in the future. So then after our folders and lists, we then have tasks subtasks, as you can see over here, a checklist as as well. So the way that this works is folders don't actually carry any tasks, neither do spaces. All the tasks are going to live within your lists. So I have my list here, my list here. Both have our parent tasks and our subtasks. So the way that I like to view these is the parent tasks are kind of deliverables or they're going to be milestones within a project. And the subtasks are all the steps that are necessary to complete that deliverable or complete that milestone within a project. So if I go into my live workspace here, let's show you kind of what that looks like in a live environment. I'm going to go and just check out a task like this. So you'll see here we have our Pinterest campaign, the best customer service and paper, that's what the campaign is called. We're doing this for Michael Scott Paper company. This is one of our customers. As you'll see here, the parent task, that's the deliverable and then all the subtasks underneath that are going to be all the steps that are necessary to complete that deliverable. So that's kind of what I would map out our parent and subtasks as. And then as you go into a subtask, you'll also have checklists. So as you see here, review the campaign brief, attend the brainstorm session, draft ad copy using templates and note against CMS review, copy and design, so on and so forth. Those are basically reminders of don't forget to do this, this, this and this. And so that's how you use your parent task in subtask structure. Again, if it was sort of a larger project here, I'll go down to our process library. This would be parent task and subtask. But if I had my own list here, think about things like website redesigns. The way that this is going to work is these become again milestones within a project. Maybe a better example is this one here. So if we can do sort of research and discovery, wireframes, content, design, development, launch, user guide, post launch, this list is a whole project that I have. Then underneath each of these are all the tasks necessary to complete that specific milestone. Within this whole list. So that's kind of how you would frame that. Again, we have our hierarchy overall is going to be workspace, our spaces, which are going to be our departments, folders or a list on its own, a folder is going to be sort of that service category or smaller department within the larger department, lists are going to be sort of the work categories or service lines. Tasks are going to be the milestones or our deliverables. And then the subtasks are going to be all the steps necessary to complete that deliverable or milestone. And then checklists are going to be sort of the reminders within all those tasks of don't forget to do this, this, and this. So that's how I would sort of build out and create your workspace and your tasks in the system. That's kind of a good hierarchy to play by in terms of how that structure is set up, just like that. So again, just remember we have spaces, as you can see here, we have folders, we have lists inside those lists, we have parent tasks, subtasks, and then checklists within each of these tasks as well. And then obviously there's the everything level here too. So that's our hierarchy. That's how that's set up. Again, this is very important to set this up correctly so that you can build the rest of your workspace and make it play with views and things like that in the future. So now that we know our hierarchy, let's start talking about views that are inside of ClickUp. And the reason that views are super important with the hierarchy is that a view, the way that it's set up is I can create a view at any level inside of my ClickUp hierarchy. So I can create a view here at the everything, our workspace level. If I go back here to show you, as you can see here, I can create a view here just like this. And I have a bunch of different options to choose from. But if I create a view there, I can then see work across my whole workspace. So I can see everything in here across the spaces and all the tasks within those spaces and folders and lists. However, now if I create a view here at the space level, I'm only going to see work across this anything that's within that space. And then if I create a view here at the folder level, I'm then only going to see the work that's in that folder. Or if I create a view at the list, I'm only going to see work across that's in that list. So that's Just one thing to note. With views, again, you can create them at any level in the hierarchy, workspace, space, folder, list, but you're only going to see what work is within that certain location. So going back here, as you'll see, if I go to the everything level, I can create a view again, all of your different options. We have lists, boards, calendars, gantts, timelines, team view, table, all the way down to embedding things, chat views, docs, whiteboards, and I can even create forms in ClickUp as well. So just to show you how to actually add these, you can add a list view. You'll see the options here. I can make it a private view if I want to. That's a big thing within ClickUp is if I go to actually add a view, everyone that comes into my ClickUp workspace will now see this view. So sometimes people go crazy, they add a bunch of views and then everyone gets confused because there's hundreds of views here at the everything level especially. So you want to make sure that you kind of pare these down and have some sort of standardization there for your team, because otherwise this can get a bit overwhelming. But as you see here, everyone who comes into ClickUp will see this view unless I go and I make this private. So if I go into more settings here and I make this a private view just like that, I'll convert the view. Now there's a little lock icon on it. That just means that only I can see this view and no one else can. So I can play around the filters all I want without this being edited for anyone else, because only I can see this. But anyone that comes into this public view, if they go and edit the filters or anything that's up here, that's going to change it for everyone. So just take note of that. That's one thing that can be a little bit stressful inside of ClickUp is the views being made public if the team doesn't know how to actually use them and how they're actually operating and working inside of ClickUp. So in terms of how views work, I've done another video on this in the past in terms of everything you need to know, because there's a lot that goes into it, including the hierarchy of where they're actually set up. Views really give you a lot of power, again, as I mentioned, to create views for different sort of levels of the organization. And so the way that views work here, you'll see you have options to group by certain things, so I can group by assignee. I can group by custom fields, by due dates. I group by list if I want to. I can choose to either collapse or expand all of my subtasks. And then I can also add a ton of different filters. So this is where custom fields, which we'll discuss in just a moment, will actually really come into play. And so now I have the option to filter down by certain assignees, by certain custom fields, by dependencies, by due dates, things like that. You can really pare down views with the data that's in the system. In addition, I have the option to customize this a little bit more over here. So if I wanted to adjust anything with the options in terms of wrapping text here, adding task locations to provide me some breadcrumbs of where this task is actually living here I can show close tasks if I want, subtask, parent name, so on and so forth. A lot of options you can do, views can really be made different and adjusted to what you need. In addition, you have the option to add some columns here, and this is what we'll talk about with custom fields. But you can kind of show whatever you want, whether it's comments, you want to show who it was created by, the data was closed. There's a lot of options that you have to adjust and edit these views. Lastly, with views, you'll want to note that you have the option to create whiteboards docs as well. And you can also embed things into ClickUp. Docs are super powerful because they allow you to create things like knowledge bases inside of ClickUp. You can take meeting notes in here and I'll show you what that looks like in a second. But docs are great ways to centralize all information. And as ClickUp says, it's one app to replace them all. Docs really help with that sort of what they're saying there, because docs are very powerful. And this is another video that we have. If you want to learn more about ClickUp Docs and how to use them, the link to that in the description below, if you want to watch that there as well. But the way that this all plays together, let's go to our real workspace here and kind of show you how this can look in the future. As I mentioned, things like a knowledge base. So if I go to my everything level here, I can see that I have a knowledge base here built from docs. So that's the power of ClickUp Docs is I have sort of sops built out in here for things like a blog post. I have templates for things. I can actually create public docs for clients as well to give them some onboarding instructions. I can have operation templates for people to kind of come through as they're onboarding things like that. You have a lot of power and options and I would recommend you build out a knowledge base inside of ClickUp as time goes on. That way you have all your SOPs and everything for your team. Again, that's another video that I've created that I'll link in the description below if you want to watch more about that. But other ways that views will play together and this is really how your team will work inside of ClickUp is you can create views like a my task view that essentially allow me to just filter by where the assignee is me. So now I can kind of customize this view to just show me my tasks across my whole ClickUp workspace. So as you can see, all these are just where assignee is me. And I'm able to kind of come down and see all of my tasks that I'm in charge of. I can see what's overdue, what's due today. I can adjust what I'm seeing here. I can also track time. So it gives you the ability to customize a lot inside of your ClickUp workspace and create the views that your team's going to need to get their work done faster and better. A few additional examples here. You'll see sort of again a space level view here. If you are within in client services and maybe you're an account manager that's trying to see work across multiple clients. The way that you can create that is now where you're using a custom field, which I'll show you how custom fields work in a moment. But you'll see here I have delivery space. I'm just creating a view where I'm just showing work from Schrute Farms, Dunnar Mifflin and Michael Scott Paper Co. Because that's the account manager, that's the work that he's in charge of. We're kind of overseeing here and you'll see we have this view we're grouping by client, which is a custom field I'm using. Then I'm able to just say where the account manager is, Steve. And that's going to pull all these tasks into one view just like that. So very powerful. Again with a structure that I mentioned with tasks and subtasks. You'll be able to see how that works as well because now I'll have sort of all my deliverables laid out just like this. Underneath that is all the steps necessary to complete that deliverable. And then we're also able to kind of show a progress of how many of those subtasks are done. So I highly recommend that you set up sort of your tasks and subtask structure that way so that your team can kind of follow that process. And then you'll be able to create views for sort of leadership management or whoever to kind of see that information in one place. So again, that's going to be used with some custom fields and things like that, which we'll get into. But one other example here is, as I mentioned with the docs, you can create things like meeting notes in here for maybe again, if you're in client services, you're servicing clients, you want to keep all those notes in one place, you can do that as well. In addition, like client overviews, you can make sure that all that is in ClickUp so that you don't have to go to different platforms to go and find all of that information. So highly recommend that you create a system like that where you have your notes inside of ClickUp. Your account managers are taking notes from those calls. That way you get everything into one place for your team. So now that we've gone through a lot of the views and things like that, let's kind of take a step back because I did mention some of these custom fields in here. So custom fields are very important because they're what's going to help us create those views, views and dashboards in the future. So the way that custom fields work is again, just like views, they can live at any level in our hierarchy. So I can build a custom field here at the everything level. I can also build a custom field at the space level, folder level, or list level. However, just a warning, if I build a custom field at the everything level here, that's going to create and make that custom field live on every single task that's in my ClickUp workspace, which you don't necessarily want to happen because you're going to have specific custom fields for specific departments in the future. You might also build something like a CRM here, as you can see inside of ClickUp. And so I have specific custom fields like a status one, a health score, service objective, billing, start date, end date, and I don't need that to live in all of the tasks in my delivery space, growth space, or operation space. I just want those living here in my CRM. So that's one thing that you need to be careful of don't go and create custom fields all over the place. Make sure that they're in the correct location that you want them to be in, because otherwise those custom fields will live on every single task inside of your ClickUp workspace. So to show you how custom fields are used and give you kind of a lame example here, the way that you build a custom field is again, if I'm at the list level here and I'm creating and I'm in this view here, and I go and add a new column just like that, I'm going to add that custom field to that list so that if I try to move that custom field over here, I won't be able to apply that until I actually move it to that list or to this space, because that list is within that space. So if I want to create a space level custom field here so that every task within the space gets that custom field applied to it so that I can actually fill it out. You want to make sure you go to the space level and actually create that custom field here. So I can easily go here, add a new column, and maybe I want to drop down. As you can see, there's a lot of different options that I can choose from. Drop down a text field, text area, date, progress number, checkbox, email, all the way down to a URL custom field. I can apply to this as well. So a lot of different options that you have, a lot of different use cases for, a lot of these. Keep it simple. Again, to start, don't get overly complex, because that's when you can kind of get stressed out and there's way too much going inside of your ClickUp workspace. Just keep the custom fields to a minimum and again, make sure that you don't bring them up to the everything level. Don't go ahead and go add a column here, because if I do that, basically what that's going to do is add a custom field to my entire ClickUp workspace. So keep them at least at the space level. Don't go anything higher than that. But again, as you can see, if I want to go to add a new column, maybe I wanted to add a dropdown. All I would have to do is give it a field name, give it some options, and then I can go ahead and add that column. As you'll see here, I added one example and I can apply option one, option two, option three to all of these tasks, just to kind of show you how that works. Very easy to kind of add that custom field after, as you'll see, I'm not seeing it there. If I click into a task and you want to see what custom fields are actually applied to this, you have to go to Details. You'll see the custom fields there. We'll have example option 2. You'll see it just like that. And additionally I go show hide. This is going to be all the columns or custom fields that I can show. And as you'll see, those are all applied there. So just because you don't see this column or that a custom field in this view does not mean that these tasks do not have that custom field applied to it. Just go ahead, click into the task, and you'll see it right there in the custom field. So that's kind of another way to see it. Otherwise you can bring it up to the view. As I was mentioning, views can get a little bit confusing because they have all these different settings on them. They can add different columns. They have the filters and things like that as well. So just to show you some power with how you can start to use custom fields now is these are great for specific views. So let's say again, this is kind of a funny example. I'll dive into the Live ClickUp workspace to show you something better. But as you can see here, I have all of my different options. So that's just my random custom field that I created in here. It's a dropdown custom field. And let's say I wanted to create a view at the space level to only show me the tasks that are labeled option one. So what I could do is I can go to this space if I have a list here. I can also create a new list view if I wanted to come to this list. And what I can do is, let's just say I'm going to group this by none and then I'm going to do subtasks. Let's just keep them collapsed. Then I want to do filters, and this is where I can do the custom field of example. I'll type that in just like this is option one. So that's going to pull up all the tasks that are labeled as option one. Again, it looks kind of funny because you're like, wait, the option one's not actually applied to that task. But again, if you go and click into the task, you'll see that there in the details. And in addition, I can also go add the column there. I can move this into the view. That way we can see it and just know, okay, there's option one there. We're all good. To go. That's why it's showing up in this filter. However, this is great. But again, this is where it can be very confusing for people on your team or new ClickUp users. Because when I go into this, if I don't realize that this view has filters on it. So if I come here and let's say the example again, I set the same settings up here as option one. Now I look at this, I'm like, oh, shoot, I just made tasks disappear. Where did they go? Are they in the trash that I archive them? And people get a little lost because of that, but it's just because it's a view and there's filters on. So that's one thing. Just remind your team and remind yourself as you get in here, always check to see if there's filters here, check to see the settings. And that's probably why there's tasks that might live in that list but you're not seeing them. You can always add another view to just kind of clarify, okay, they're still there. But just know if I clear those filters, those are still. Their views are not where the data is being held. They're just visualizing the data. So it's another powerful thing. In ClickUp, you can visualize data and really however which way you want. So if you like a Gantt view, you can see it in that way. If you like a list view, a table view, org view, whatever it may be, you have the option to do that. In addition, you can create a view at every level in the hierarchy and use those custom fields to really add some additional filters and things like that to those views. So a lot of power there. Again, these custom fields are very powerful when it comes to things like assigning work or just getting reports in views in the future, which I'll show you some of those. And also kind of building things out like a CRM, because you have a lot of custom field options that you can apply to those tasks to get a lot of data within the tasks in your system. So to show you again, sort of that CRM again, these are the tasks here. They're kind of like records as opposed to actual tasks. These are all custom fields applied to them like status, service, health scores, objectives, billing, start date, end dates. As you'll see, I have opportunities to create a lot of views here where one might be client health. So now I'm filtering where the client health is green, where it's yellow. If I had any red, I'd kind of see it that way. So you have a lot of options here. As you can see, I'm grouping these by different things. So CRMs are great in ClickUp because you have those custom fields. Although it's not going to take over something like a HubSpot or Salesforce because of the customization capabilities, you do have a lot of options here inside of ClickUp. In addition, one thing that I love to create in ClickUp is what I call assignee views. And this is where you're going to start to leverage a lot of sort of ClickUp power ups. And so this assignee view. And I'll kind of backtrack in a moment when we talk about templates, we'll kind of go through how this is actually used here inside of ClickUp. But what I can do is I can basically create a view here that allows me to group a bunch of tasks together by a certain custom field and then I can assign all those out. So as you can see, I have an assignee view right there. It's grouped by delivery role, which is a custom field that I'm leveraging in my tasks. And then the subtasks are separate tasks and I can take all of these and I can actually go and this is your Multi select toolbar. So if you select a bunch of different tasks and click up, either you can select it if they're all grouped together, or I can kind of go through just like this, selecting a bunch of random tasks if I want to, or I can hold down shift, grab a bunch of tasks, and I can come up here and I can apply whatever I want. So if I want to set custom fields, I want to set dates, or if I want to assign someone to these, I can go click on me and assign all those tasks to me. So again, that might seem a little confusing. Let me take a step back and kind of show you how those are actually applied. But if I go back into my process library where all my templates are built out, as you'll see in these tasks, I have a custom field applied to these is this is one I would highly recommend everyone use. You'll see here my podcast episode, each of those has a delivery role, and that was a custom field I was using to sort and group by in that view. So as you can see, senior strategist, copywriter, copywriter, strategist, all those tasks now will have that data applied to it. And I can take that and create a view from it that allows me to just group by those specific tasks that have that custom field applied to it. So again, if I come back to an assignee view here, again, as you can see, those are the copywriter tasks. Again, it's coming out of the process. All these tasks have them. So that's how they're going to be grouped together, just like that. So powerful custom field. There's a lot that you kind of want in there. Don't go too far, too far. Don't use too many to start. Make sure you narrow those down. But then as you kind of grow into the system, start to add more. So you kind of leverage those to make you a bit faster inside of ClickUp. So those are custom fields. Again, very, very helpful inside of your workspace. But again, kind of take it day by day. Don't go too far with all of your custom fields because it can get a little bit messy if you start creating them all over the place, and especially if you move them to the everything level as well. So from there, the next step that I want to talk about is adding tasks and leveraging templates as well. So as you can see in here, I have parent tasks, I have subtasks. It's very easy to add a task, as you can see here. If I want to add one to this list, all I got to do is add a task like that, parent task, just like that. You can also, if you have a bunch of tasks listed out in a spreadsheet, you can actually take those, copy them, and. And ClickUp will recognize multiple rows here. So you can actually take it from a spreadsheet and create like 50 tasks all at once if you want to. So that's another hack inside of ClickUp, which is super nice. Other options you can do is you can press T on your keyboard and actually create a task just like this. So that's a hotkey that's actually turned on for you to be able to do that. So if you have hotkeys turned on, you can do that. You can also go up here, add a task just like that. So there's a lot of options. You also see this button here. It's not hard to create a task inside of ClickUp, but you want to make sure that you leverage ClickUp templates, which the template center is the biggest thing you want to leverage inside of ClickUp so that you can actually create these workflows and not have to build tasks from scratch every time. As you can see, it might be a pain to add these tasks in here, to assign them, to add a due date, to add a time estimate, to add custom fields. We want to make sure all that data comes with the tasks. And so that's how you can leverage the ClickUp template center. And so to really explain that, well, I'm going to go back into my live portal here and kind of show you how that works. So as I mentioned, and I told you, I have a process library in here, which I highly recommend, that's the first thing you do, is you go build out a process library inside of ClickUp. Because a process library is where you're going to build out your processes or your workflow templates in here. Because that's going to be what actually helps you and makes your workflow way easier, makes you actually more productive inside of the system and get sort of visibility that you need in the future. But what you want to do is go create a process library with sort of your growth, your operations, delivery, focus, templates, or really whatever you offer for clients or internally and go start building those out. So again, let's go to some examples here of how this should look. But as you can see, like my blog post here, this is a right now, it's not a template, it's just a task and subtasks within my process library. But I have my parent task here, I have my subtasks here, I have my due dates, I have my time estimates, I have deliver roles. I have different custom fields in here as well. I have also built out dependencies in all these tasks as well, which I can use for remapping due dates in the future. But if we go back here, what I'm going to do now and again follow this framework, make sure all of your steps are in here and I can take this and I can save this as a template. So I come here to templates, save as a template. I can name it and then I can go ahead and save it just like that. So very powerful. Now, if you want to actually deploy that, I can go here, delivery space. Say I'm doing a blog post for Michael Scott Paper company. I can come here to the list settings just like this, into templates, browse templates. And I have all those templates now saved in here that I've created. I can go make sure I have task templates turned on. We're going to do blog posts just like this, use this template. I can name it now if I want to. And I can also remap the date. So I built those dates into that template. But now I can easily go and remap it. Let's say this is going to be due the 29th, just like that. Now I'm going to go ahead and use that template and deploy it. And all the data that was on that, all of the custom fields and everything is going to come with that template now and make it way easier for me to go ahead and get this work assigned again with that assignee view that I just showed you, I'm going to use those delivery roles. But now, as you can see, I have my due dates in here, I have my time estimates, I have any task descriptions that are in these tasks, and I also have the checklist items in here as well. So all that data is going to be brought with the workflow, make it way more scalable for our team, and make it way easier for me to create tasks that have all this other stuff on it as well. So I highly recommend you leverage the template center inside of ClickUp. But for that, you want to make sure you build a process library, because these will be your source files for all of those templates. Because if I save something in the template center, it only lives in the template center unless I have again the source file, which is here. So you want to make sure you do that and build out your processes elsewhere. Because the template center, you can't edit in the template center. It's just a place to store and deploy. But the other thing to know about templates is you could also build them at any level of the hierarchy. So as we talked about space, folders, lists, tasks and subtasks, I can save a task template, I can save a list template. So if I came here and I had a client onboarding process, which that's something I highly recommend that you build out, because everyone does onboarding for customers or clients that they bring on, I can go here and I can actually save this one as a template at the list. And what that does then is it brings the parent tasks, subtasks, all the views with it as well. So you can save it as a list, you can also save a folder as a template, you can also save a space as a template, and you can also save a view as a template. So if you have a view here that you like, sort of all the settings with it, you like the columns that are listed out, and you want to take this view and replicate it somewhere else, you can come here and I can save this as a template just like that. Then if I were to go to another location, let's say go to delivery shrut farms here, and I want to create that view, I can create another view, or I can just take a view that's actually in here. So let's just do this one. I can click here, I'll go to Templates, browse Templates, and then I can go and deploy a view template right onto that one. So it's a great way to standardize your views, make it easier for your team. I highly recommend that you have some view templates, like a basic to do list or something like that for your team. So that way they don't come into a location here and get confused by all the views that you have. So standardize your views. That's definitely important piece of this process. So templates are one of my favorite things. You can also create doc templates as well. So kind of the same process. But I can come here and I can say this as a template. So if you have a meeting template or something like that, and ClickUp High, recommend that you save those out as well. Just like an agenda here that you can always follow for your team. So go ahead and create a template for that again. Deploy it over and over and over again when you need that. So, lot of things that we've covered Today inside of ClickUp, just a few more to go through. One of them now is going to be the visibility and reporting on the other side of it. So ClickUp Dashboards and the way that ClickUp Dashboards work is again, we're going to be, if you go down into dashboards here, you have the opportunity to create a lot of different customized dashboards, really for whatever you want. So whether you want to look at something, just sort of overall performance of your team, which I highly recommend. So we have our ClickUp Leaderboard here, and all of these are different widgets or cards within this. So each of them have their own settings and filters. Again, those filters can have the same filters that your View would. So if you want to use custom fields for here, you can do that as well. But you'll see you have the opportunity to add cards just like this. So there's a lot of different options to add, whether it's bar charts, whether it's bird charts, whatever it may be. You have a lot of different options. And again, you can resize all of these as well. Just make sure you're in edit mode. If you're not, then you won't have the opportunity. And then people kind of get stuck. They're like, why can't I edit this? It's really just because you don't have edit mode turned on. So make sure that's turned on as you go into your dashboard to start editing this. But as you can see here, our ClickUp leaderboard has things like workspace points that kind of track how the team's doing, who's behind to see again, how's the team doing? Are they not doing so well in terms of unread notifications, how many tasks are overdue and things like that, as well as looking at time reporting, task progress and things like that. Another dashboard I highly recommend is time reporting. So if you are tracking time inside of ClickUp, as you can see here, I have the opportunity to filter down to specific locations if I want to. But as you can see here now, if I'm in client services, I can start to see these are my folders as we go over here, these are my folders for our clients and we can kind of see what's the estimated time versus what's the actual track time and we start to see the difference between those two. In addition, we can also see, based off some custom fields here, our services like SEO review and Strategy inbound email, what are the services that are over or under on our time estimate time track as well. So a lot of different options you have for dashboards. These are really the great way to start getting the visibility out of what you've created. Again, all of it has to do with how you actually set up ClickUp. So I highly recommend you kind of follow this hierarchy. Think about the departments within your organization, your business. Are you in client services? If you are, I highly recommend you have a delivery space. If you have a sales and marketing team or your growth team, which probably do highly recommend putting all their work in one space here as well, to keep that all sort of centralized in one spot and operations as well. Kind of great to centralize that there too. And then highly recommend always have a process library here as well. So dashboards are amazing in ClickUp, but again, it's all built on how you actually structure your workflows and your work inside of ClickUp. And the last thing that I'll talk about is automations. I wouldn't recommend diving too deep into automations from the start because automations can be a bit much if you start to add a bunch and then you don't realize which automations are actually live inside of your ClickUp workspace. So some people go in, they add a bunch of automations to automate their workflow and it seems great, but then a bunch of stuff fires off and is triggered and then you have no idea what the heck's happening. So then maybe you run out of automations because you don't Have a high enough ClickUp plan and then you're in trouble. So in terms of adding automations and some that we usually recommend, as I mentioned this account manager view a bit ago, this one has client custom field used in it as well as this account manager. So automations that are pretty simple is you can kind of just come here and to find those automations you'll go into folder settings automations. And if I had an active automation here, what I could do is as I can come here and say, hey, when a task is created just like that from any source, I can go ahead and say set custom field of account manager to Steve. So that's kind of one that's easy. So basically any task that gets added to the Shrub Farms folder just like that, we'll get that account manager custom field applied to it. So it's kind of an easy way to again get that data on there, get that custom field applied to it. That way you can create views in the future. So definitely a powerful one, especially if you have account managers that are looking for views of work across a bunch of different clients sort of in one place to sort of see the progress and things like that. But that's an easy one to build. There's other ones. I won't go into all the details here. If you have any questions about any automations that I'd recommend, feel free to let me know. Leave them in the comments below. But one thing to note about automations is you do have the opportunity to add them again at any level in the hierarchy. So if I just wanted to add an automation to this list, I could come here into list settings, add an automation. If I wanted it to be in a folder, I could do that. If I wanted to be in the space, I could do that as well. And the reason that's important is because now if I just created at the list, it's only going to automate anything within that list. If I created the folder now, it's going to automate sort of any task that goes into any of these lists. If it's in the space, it's going to do it across all of these. So the hierarchy again is super important. You need to understand the hierarchy before you do anything else in ClickUp, understand your hierarchy, understand views, understand how tasks work and kind of build your templates and then all of it will start to come together and there you have it. That's how you use ClickUp. And if you have any questions, as I mentioned, please leave in the comments below and I will go ahead and answer those for you. Or if you need help from ClickUp's first and highest rated solutions partner. To streamline your operations inside of ClickUp, go to zenpod.com call and book a call with one of our Experts. We've helped 2,700 different teams build more productive, profitable and healthy teams by streamlining their operations in ClickUp, and we'd love to do the same for you. Anyways, thanks for watching this video. If you liked it, please go and hit subscribe so that you can get notified the next time we drop another ClickUp video. But anyways, we'll see you again next time. Can I make no more I can't replace it Trying hard just not to waste it it's about time it's about time yeah, it's about time.