My Strategy for ClickUp Implementation | Use tutorials, structure, and process to improve adoption

Change is hard. And what I want to talk about in this live is the different ways you can approach change and how that's informed, the way that I implement ClickUp specifically, but also all sorts of other changes in your business. So whether it's process change, workflows, improvements. I've talked to a lot of you this week. It's been a lot of conversations recently, which is great. A lot of you this week have been talking about how you are really excited to work with your processes and systems. You're like, yes, I am ready to do this, but you don't know where to get started, or you're entirely paralyzed by the idea of getting started. And what I think it comes down to is not having a good or confident way to approach this idea of change, whether it's changing your workflows or documenting those workflows, which is a change in your behavior of how you do things, or changing to using ClickUp from Trello or Asana or that trusty notebook that you have with you everywhere. I want to tell you how my perspective on change is. Has changed. And hopefully that'll give you kind of something to chew in on and think about. This is a little bit more mindset y but to give you kind of a way to approach this, because this was a topic that came up a lot this week. So there we go. If you are joining us live and you have any thoughts or questions about change, please do let me know. And thank you for the excitement about having this all come together. Me too. I'm excited as well. All right, so let's start talking about chains today. This is. This is a picture of what I thought change was just a few months back. Change for me was all about just kind of more, right? More. Getting to the next level meant adding more stuff. And maybe some of you are in the stage of business where it feels like you're going to be leveling up. If you can just have a longer welcome email sequence, if you can just have more content, if you can just have, you know, the really good process for this, that and the other. All of your things have a process to you that is leveling up. And that's what I used to think about when I thought of change is just kind of a more. It was a quantity thing that you just got to this next level and it was kind of always in flux, but you made it there, kind of like filling up a cup and you had these kind of bars that you were trying to reach. And Maybe that's the type 3 enneagram coming out, but that's what I was originally thinking. And maybe some of you are here. And for those of you who are here, or at least I know some of you are, because I've had this conversation. When you're in this position of thinking about change, especially when it comes to process or ClickUp stuff, oftentimes you're looking at it from this kind of position where you are sitting here in this bottom of the cup, if you will, and you're looking up and you're just trying to think, oh, my gosh, how will I ever get to that top point? How will I ever get to my goal? Or when I'm just so far beneath it? This perspective on change kind of makes it feel like all or nothing. So in ClickUp terms, if we're talking about tech implementation, when you have this perspective, you're paralyzed to get started, right? You're looking at ClickUp and you're like, to be able to do that, I need to do. I need to set up a hundred different spaces. I need 50 different templates, I need 3,000 different docs. It's just completely paralyzing because I am just so, so far from that level that I would need to be at. Because, you know, some people just got it, some don't. I'm just not there. And this is a hard position to be at because when you're thinking about this, especially if we're thinking about water as the metaphor, you have to. You have to always swim, right? If you're in water. So let's just imagine this cup. Let's go ahead and take our little dude and let's give him some action here. Let's say we did get a little bit more water in the cup. We start leveling up a little bit. Well, it's constantly this swimming process of trying to stay afloat. I don't know if I can draw someone swimming that kind of looks like swimming, right? Trying to stay afloat as you're trying to get up to that next level. It's constant work each step of the way. And that's how I felt when I was thinking about change in this way. And if you're feeling this way and you're looking at ClickUp, that combination is. It's a lot. Hey, guys, thanks for the comments. Appreciate it. Okay, moving on. I'm going to go from this perspective on change and how that applies to ClickUp, and we're going to move it over to kind of where at least myself, I went next when it came to change. And this and actually, let me see which is in the right order. There we go. All right, here's the next type of change, and I'm using metaphors for each one of these. I think it's because I'm hungry and thirsty, but this is supposed to look like cake. Just humor me on that. The next perspective on change is this kind of one. It's this idea of layers. Whereas with the water example, there's always going to be a higher ceiling. And as the ceiling gets higher, it's more work to get there. If we think about change in layers, we've got a little bit of a safety here. So you could also see this used as a stair example, whereas the other one would have been the equivalent of climbing a rope. If you think about change in layers, if you. It becomes a lot more attainable. And a lot of time when I hear people talk about change, they use some kind of stair or steps or foundation metaphor. And when we're doing. When we're approaching change in this way, when it comes to ClickUp, we're able to chunk it, right? We see ClickUp, or we see technology change, or we see documenting my whole business, and we're like, okay, yeah, I just need to do all of these pieces because I know ClickUp is made of spaces and lists and folders and custom fields and views. Okay, no problem. I just need to do one layer at a time. Just take a section of it and just start working on it. That might be a section based on, you know, area of your business. That could be a section based on whatever you see first on YouTube. You just kind of start chunking it, and that's how you get your way through your goals. And I would say for most types of change, the idea of doing a stairwell, that's not too stressful, that actually feels pretty good to go up and climb the stairs of making some kind of change in your business. But it's not exactly the way I would want to approach learning. The idea of layers is great, but there's a missing piece of the order that you need to go to add these layers of learning. So specifically around learning, we don't want a water cup example where it's always more work to get to the next level. And we don't necessarily want layers, because if you watch the Great British Bake off, you'll learn things like tempered chocolate should not be on the top, it should be on the bottom. All these other things instead, we want to think about. And this is the last metaphor, I promise here, a stool. So I Think a stool is a great example or a tripod is a great example to think about when it comes to change or learning or getting somewhere, because it implies balance. So when we are trying to level up, I don't know if any of you have those stools or tripods where they have the extending legs or the crank legs on each side. You can kind of adjust one at a time when you do that. And I wish I had one for here as an example, but you need to kind of keep everything in balance. And I think that's a better metaphor or mindset when it comes to change, especially for technology. So this kind of stool example, I'm going to break it out a little bit more over here. This stool example kind of combines pieces of all of it. You have chunks that you can go through, but we can group them into categories to make it feel less overwhelming. And we do it in a specific order. It's not just this big cup that we're sitting in saying, this is the end, and I need to just get there. It's not this layer cake where we're like, I just need to take a chunk at a time. Let's just put this together. We'll figure it out. It's instead taking things and being intentional about the order you do them and maintaining a balance to keep everything kind of moving forward at more or less the same pace. So when it comes to ClickUp, tying it back to that, when we're trying to implement ClickUp, there are three or four categories of things that need to happen simultaneously. So we might call one of these, and I'm going to just kind of pull these off the cuff here. We might call one of these the actual setup. That's one stool piece of the stool here. Ooh, stool setup. The other piece is probably going to be your workflows, and the third piece might be something like training or just your understanding that's not. You spelled training or just your understanding of the tool. And those are a little hard to see there. But workflows, setup, and training. And when we are implementing ClickUp or we're making this change, it's helpful to think about these three categories of things that need to be done in more or less the same time. You'll notice maybe some of you have worked with me, maybe you haven't, but when I'm doing a click of implementation or any kind of change in, we don't really do, like, workflows. Okay, we'll never touch that again. Let's set it all up. Okay, we set it all up. It's perfect. Here it is. Go learn it. I think in some ways I describe my service like that. Many of you might as well if you're in this space. But that's not how it works. That is not how it works or not how it works successfully. That is kind of the layer cake approach. All one thing, all the other thing, all the third thing. But when it comes to learning a tool or kind of teaching your team or bringing someone on, what I find is the most effective way to implement a tool is by taking it as kind of a stool approach. So if we have our workflows, we want to maybe go heavy on that. Maybe we'll do, you know, we'll really focus on workflows to get clear at the beginning. Then we're going to do a little bit of setup. And while we're doing a little bit of setup, let's teach people, you know, what is a folder space, a list? What level should we be building at? What do we need to keep in mind around custom fields? So we're going to throw in some. Going to throw in some training at that point. Okay, so we've got the basic stuff set up. We've got a little bit of structure. Well, then it's time to start going back and forth on that setup and training. So if we add a little bit more to these stools or these legs of the stool. Okay, now we're at a point where everything's a little bit level. Our stool is level. We're starting to feel comfortable a little bit more. Okay, time to get things out of equilibrium again and start pushing ourselves forward. So in this case, since we have everything being pretty level, I can pick, okay, what area do I want to dig into? Where do I want to push us next? I think, and I'm just going to make this bigger because I know this is a small image. I think most likely we're probably going to push the setup forward. And what I find often is when we start pushing the setup forward, once we start getting into designing those workflows in ClickUp, all of a sudden we're pushing ourselves back into the workflows area because there's some unanswered questions about how can we. For example, we're trying to manage IT tickets, and maybe we're starting to set up that area and a question comes up like, huh, well, we're setting this up. But I realized that in order to close my IT tickets, I need to have the person who submitted the ticket sign off. That would be a really cool step in my workflow. So we add that into the workflow and we kind of reflect on how that process could be improved. And then we find ourselves, or I find myself teaching about automations because that's a helpful way to make sure that those approvals get done. This is a comment I had on YouTube so I can talk more about approvals and ClickUp later on. But do you see how the journey of implementation becomes this kind of like circle of walking up a circular staircase or going up, you know, legs of a stool versus thinking about it as layer cakes or is this big cup of water that you have to swim up to get higher and higher. To me, I find this a really helpful metaphor. Maybe that's just for me, but a helpful way to think about implementation. And I've been thinking about this a lot because as you guys know over there in that thing called clicking up this little guy, one of the pieces I'm hoping to really highlight here, and I'm still trying to really polish, but it's informed by this opinion. One of the things I'm trying to polish is the way I implement ClickUp because I've been doing it for a while. But if any of you perform a service, you kind of just start doing things in a way, especially when it's one on one. You're able to be more go with the flow, read the room, act off of feedback. And as I'm trying to take what I do and turn it into something that anyone could follow the framework for, I've been really trying to be aware of how do I approach the implementation. And this metaphor is probably. This is the biggest kind of way to think about it. So from the cup of overwhelm, where you're paralyzed and just sitting there thinking, oh my gosh, I will never be able to finish this. I'm just gonna call this like the overwhelmed guy who doesn't get started to the cake, which feels like this is usually the perfectionist who's trying to just get one thing done at a time. And to be clear, this is what I used to do. So. So they might have their measuring their. What are they called? Oh, my gosh. My husband's a carpenter and I don't know the L squared. Oh, I don't know, whatever. Trying to make sure that your angles are perfect and trying to make sure everything is great before you move forward. That is kind of the perfectionist approach to building. That's more of like the layer cake. One thing at a time. Let's finish all the custom Fields, and let's go to all the statuses, let's go to all the folders. You can probably hear this person in ClickUp because they're the person asking, what's the right whatever it is, what's the right structure, what's the right custom fields, what's the right whatever? And that is the kind of the signs of the perfectionism. This person. You'll hear them say things like overwhelm. And then the stool person, you're probably not hearing much from them because they're kind of chipping away. These people are, I would say, kind of like we look at what's the quote about the sculptors, where they're kind of chipping away the face. This is a poor drawing, but you see what I'm saying. Oops, okay, where you're kind of chipping away at a piece of stone, trying to create what you want to do one little piece at a time, and you're kind of working your way up that stool, making sure all of your different elements are in balance versus trying to perfect one area. This is also a very iterative approach, which I know is a buzzword, but it's the idea of doing something imperfectly and fixing it, because doing a bunch of little actions is going to get you closer to the end result, especially with something like ClickUp, then just trying to get it all right the first time, because you're going to make so many wrong assumptions that you'll end up going back and redoing it anyway. So what's next Is probably a good phrase to listen for when you're in that stool mindset, because you're thinking, okay, I did something. You know, it's not great, but I'm going to keep going. What's next? What' the next thing I can do. And this is definitely the way that I like to approach change and a mindset that I like to put teams into when we're starting. The idea of being okay with doing things imperfectly, the idea of understanding that there is no right way, and if there is, you will not find it the first time. I find that generally teams, when they're creating their own structure, it gets about 30% right from. From the first time around. 30% of their structure is on point. Maybe it's where they build in the hierarchy. Maybe it's their custom fields are right, maybe it's their names are right. Maybe it's just the colors feel right. But the other 70% takes some more time. After two or three passes over a structure, it gets pretty dialed in, but because we're relying on so many different types of knowledge, the idea of just going straight to a full setup is really challenging. And this is part of the reason why I moved away from offering intensives a while back. I. Who knows, maybe I'll go back to it at some point if I can perfect the practice. But with intensives you tend to focus very much on execution and unless you have an intensive really balanced with these other two parts, you can end up building something really fast. Yeah, but it's not going to do the job. It'll be an unstable stool because you haven't worked on the workflows and the training at the same time. Particularly training is hard when you're doing a rapid implementation. So, yeah, this is just kind of a peek inside my mind as to how do I approach the implementation thing. How do I kind of set the stage for the teams I'm working with and how we're going to build and also just kind of why I don't have firm stages for one piece or another. So I do. Nope, that's the last piece for this morning. So I just kind of wrap up with talking about clicking up a bit because that's what inspired all of this because I am trying to better capture the way I approach things and how that's a little bit different than what you might see others do. And this is. This is clicking up. So I'm going to go into a little bit of behind the scenes here and talk about what is going to be in here because some of you have seen it. Actually, hold on one second, let me go into the actual thing and you'll see a little bit more of what I'm talking about. So this is the actual clickingup community, like where it's going to be living in and you can kind of get a sense from here what's going to be covered in each piece of it. Now I can't go into the actual specific lessons. They're here, but I'm not Like some of the names are going to be changing a little bit. So I don't want to give away everything, but I want to talk about this a little bit in case this helps some of you. So when we talk about layers of the stool, right. We think about like the pieces we want to work on. That structure is what I've used to build out the module pieces of clicking up. So clicking up includes back here it has kind of a lessons, which has a set curriculum and then it has kind of these, you know, grab them when you need Them additional learning. And one thing, one question I get a lot about this is wait, why, why do we have this? When you have the YouTube channel, you're putting out so many videos a week. Why not just, why wouldn't I just watch those videos? The biggest challenge with YouTube for learning and let's we can actually go back to that stool here. Biggest problem with YouTube is it is entirely usually one leg of the stool. You might get a little bit of the other one. But that sequence, figuring out where you need to go next is a choose your own adventure. You're kind of figuring it out and what you end up most likely with is just a bunch of tips that you need to piece together into some kind of path that makes sense for you. Whereas clicking up and kind of any other thing with a curriculum is going in a particular order. So in my instance in clicking up here, these lessons are actually built around the order of the stools going in that circle through each step. So there's not a here's your workflows, get it all ready. No, there's not a here's all the features of ClickUp, learn them all. No, because people don't remember that it just goes in one ear, out the other. If you go too heavy on training too quickly, you don't retain any of it. So instead if you go through here, the modules are organized by kind of the problem you're trying to solve, because I find that that's more effective. So first it's about mastering to do list, getting a clear sense of how to organize your tasks. So that workflow of task management, the functions needed to master your tasks and then of course how to set up those tasks in ClickUp. Then we add in collaboration. So once again we're going around the stool on the workflows for collaboration, the technology, the technical skills you need to know for collaboration and the structure needed for collaboration. After that we go into organizing your data. So just having a greater sense of organization. Now this one skews pretty heavily on the setup and training side. There's not a whole lot of workflows here, but we make up for it in these following sections. So these ones we start talking about using ClickUp faster. So shortcuts different ways to structure your day in ClickUp so that way you can find what you need to so where to start your day, how to wrap things up, what are the best practices for your team? And when we get towards the bottom here, especially troubleshooting, we are all about real life scenarios. So this is things like the workflows you need to onboard your team to ClickUp? What's the preferred structure? What are the ways that you can increase the adoption rate of your team to ClickUp? Because I've heard it, many of you have been there where you actually you have your team in ClickUp, but it's not quite sticking. You're still getting those emails and as soon as a few people start kind of jumping off the ship, it can be very hard for a small team to stay focused on using ClickUp and things can kind of start to unwind from there. After that. We've got more of the use cases. So this is kind of a mixture of workflows and setup. We've got templates as well as interviews which tell you more of the story behind how a business and the structure connects. These ones don't really have anything to do with training, whereas these ones up here in the in the earlier stages do have a little bit more of that teaching and training element in here. So this is clicking up. I wanted to share that because obviously it's a new thing. I'm excited about sharing it, but also it's why this topic is so top of mind for me. So if you have any questions or thoughts about this idea, maybe you think I'm crazy, maybe you're like, oh, this makes sense. I would love to hear it in the comments below. So if you're watching us live, feel free to leave a comment and say hi. If you're watching the replay, also say hi, because I would love to chat with you here in the group. So that is it for this live. Thank you guys so much for joining me. If you're watching this replay again, leave me a comment, let me know and I will see you guys next week or on Monday for the live Q and A. So thanks so much for watching.