Quick ClickUp Tour for Beginners | Is ClickUp right for you?
Laila walks through ClickUp's core features: hierarchy, task management, multiple views, and collaboration tools. The video helps you figure out if ClickUp fits how you work.
Hey guys, Layla here and I wanted to give you a little bit of a tour of ClickUp. This video is going to stay very high level on what ClickUp is, so that way you can do a gut check. So if you are considering a task or project management tool, or even a work management tool, if we want to get fancy, and you're like, what is this ClickUp thing people keep talking about in this video? We're going to kind of give you a gut feel of how the tool works. And if this feels like it aligns with how your brain works, awesome. If you're looking at this and you're like, there's no way I could ever get this, maybe watch another video. And if you are running just well, then, you know, ClickUp might not be for you. So here is the kind of the main hierarchy of ClickUp and I won't go into the details because again, this is for more of a gut check. I'll have a more detailed tutorial coming in on this later on, but the main hierarchy is using these folders over here on the right. So we've got spaces, we've got folders, we've got lists between them, and inside each list, just like you might be used to on Asana, are a bunch of tasks. Now, tasks aren't just what you're used to in your typical to do list, although they certainly can be. See, you can just click to do and then they're gone, just like you'd be used to on something like Google Keep. But these tasks can also contain additional details, a lot of additional details. And I'm going to open this to show you what it looks like. And I'm going to warn you, there's a lot of stuff in here. When you click on a task, it opens the detail pane. And here is where it goes from being a simple task tool to a really complicated and just robust project management tool. So every single task, let me move my face out of the way here. Every single task can have subtasks and checklists. Within a subtask, you can also have checklists. And it's basically these layers and layers of information you can have within every single task. As you can see, each task and subtask has a description area where you can include instructions for how to do said task, which is really nice from a process perspective because by creating a task, you can actually also teach the person how to do that thing. So as you see here in their example setup, they actually have some nice tutorials inside the description to tell you how to complete the task in every single task field. There's also a comments area to leave a note and it's pretty smooth. It's got some nice emojis and other things built into here. Everything you could need I'm put toilet. Why not everything you might need in order to have a solid collaboration experience around task and project management, you can also attach attach files to each of these tasks. Normal stuff like tracking your time. Actually shouldn't say that tracking your time is not normal in a lot of tools, but it is included in this tool. But time estimates and due dates and start dates are also things that you can track on the task level. Talk more about this logging timepiece later. But that is a really nice feature. Let me just show you while we're here. Basically it has a timer or a manually adding time mode where you can track time that you spend on tasks, which is really helpful for those of us who are managing teams or bill hourly and want to keep a running or just want to have an idea of how much time we're spending on different things in our business. So this is kind of the basic area. It looks a lot like a Excel spreadsheet or an asana list. But the magic of ClickUp is that it has different views for ways to view these same tasks now under view. It's going to be a little confusing. There's two sections, task views, which is what we're talking about right now, and then this other section right now. Let's focus on the top. Task views are different ways for you to view these tasks, and that's pretty much it. You can view them in a Kanban board, which is called Board View. Here we are same exact tasks as we just saw over here, but in a board view. You can also view them in a calendar view, in a box view, or in a Gantt view. Gantt, if you're not familiar with, is kind of that Microsoft projects kind of look of start dates and end dates might not look super impressive on this one because I don't know that there's a lot of dates in there. Basically you can put things on a chart like this. Very cool. Oh, great. So let's go on here. What else can you do in ClickUp and why is it so cool? Well, you don't have to just work on tasks in ClickUp and I actually think working on tasks is fantastic. And if you were just looking for tasks, ClickUp is still a good tool. But if you're looking to do other things, not just track your tasks and do them that's where ClickUp really becomes above and beyond the alternatives. So in this views area I told you about the second section, and they call them page views, bit of a misnomer because they're not all really pages, but basically it's stuff that's not tasks that you can add up top here within your folder or list wherever you're working. Yeah, we'll talk more about that. Watch the full tutorial for figuring out what is a folder, what is a list, and how do all these views connect. Right now let's just focus on that gut feeling. So in here we've got different views of things that you can add here in here. So I could actually add a chat room into this folder that I'm on right now. And so when people go in here and they click on practice using ClickUp, they'll be able to enter this chat room where they can type comments not attached to a task, which is really nice because sometimes there's just things you need to say that you want to notify people about, but you don't necessarily have a specific task to attach them to. That's what the chat's for. There's also DocView, which is basically like Google or Dropbox Paper or very simple wiki layout. Here you go. It's just a basic type typing area with pages and sub pages and some cool features of things that you can embed into it and use to format it. So a lot of cool stuff there. I wouldn't say it's nearly as robust as something like Google Docs, which people often compare it to, but it gets the job done and it's nice for getting ideas out of your head. So if you are someone that's using Notion and you really like the ability to just type out all of your thoughts, you might find that Pages or the Docs feature in ClickUp could be a pretty good alternative for that. So as we keep going on here, a few other views. If you need a full Google Doc to be embedded, we also have an embed view here where you can actually embed a full document, spreadsheet, airtable, table, coda, document, whatever is able to be embedded in an iframe you can actually embed in a tab here. There's also forms, which they're very, very basic at this point, but basically forms that you can share publicly that input information to create tasks or do other things. I imagine this is going to become a lot more powerful as the future approaches because ClickUp is getting into automations in the very near future. I Think there was a recent post saying it's coming out soon. That was just, I think yesterday. So it could even be out by the time this video is published. So that is basically the cool ClickUp infrastructure. When you are clicking on a topic, which is kind of where I orient myself. I've used folders in my business for topics or projects or topics of work. When you're focused on that project, you have every single thing you need to work on that project right here. You have the spreadsheet with all of your marketing data. You have the doc with all of your passwords. Oh God, please don't put passwords in docs. Maybe you have the doc with your brand guidelines. You have a chat to talk to your team. Every single thing relevant to this topic that you're working on is here in these views on the folder or on the list level. That's kind of the basic interface of ClickUp. I'm going to show you a few of the advanced features just to give you a taste of what else is in here. But you've got the basics here. This is where you'd be living most of the time while doing your work. So if this feels like ooh, a la la, ClickUp is probably wired the right way for your brain. If you are running away, like I said before, you might want to look at something a little bit more simple like Trello or more sophisticated like Jira. So looking in here, we've also got our notifications area where we can say pings about what's happening that's across any comments, across any chats, anywhere. We've got an inbox which shows you things that are assigned and do. And it's very similar to the My Tasks view in Asana. Dashboards is a fun area. I'll go last. And Docs, which basically accumulates all the docs that are anywhere in your workplace and lets you see them all in one place. The Dashboards view I'm going to flip over to here, actually going to show the one inside my community here because I use this for my clients. So the docs area is a very, very fun place where you can actually build out different dashboards like you would imply by the name, using information from all of your tasks or just something totally different. Here you see I have an embedded image, I have some just plain text. I've got some more images back there. I've got tasks. These are pulling in from my task area, which is where we were just at. And I've also got a doc pulling in one thing that's not so great about the dashboard is it's so new, it's a little bit funky. But the ability to drag and drop and resize and build a dashboard from scratch, it's probably not the best example. It's a little bit buggy here as I'm recording at the same time, but it is pretty darn cool. And that's what I've been able to use to build this kind of simple vault area for my clients as it stands here. So there we go. Cool. Pretty cool. Lot of use cases for this, for giving status updates to clients or to have like some kind of insider area for people who are inside your space. I also use it for team check ins and other information like that. So if you are looking to have kind of a area for scrums, an area for big goals, you can use this. You can also use these other areas which I actually don't have any set up, I don't believe. No, but you have goals area where you can actually track goals and progress towards them. This area I don't think is very well built out right now. I imagine goals is going to be looking a lot different in the next few months, but basically you can create targets and keep track of your progress towards them, whether that's revenue goals, number of clients, whatever. Down here is your portfolio. This is basically showing you collections of lists and tasks and your overall high level project status on them. So if you maybe have a folder or a list per client you want to see, how far are we on Suzy Q's design project? You could go here and kind of build a portfolio for project managers to get a high level status or to share it with clients. And then finally there's reporting. I wouldn't say the reporting in ClickUp is anything to be amazed with, but it does allow you to report things like time tracked by week, which is a really important metric and a few other things that I can imagine using more regularly. So I'm going to go back to the tasks area because like I said, that's probably where you're going to live during your time in ClickUp and show you one more feature back here on the list that I think is pretty handy. So. Oh, it's like it highlighted it for me. Down here there's a little bit of superpowers hiding in the corner of ClickUp which I again found very attractive instantly and really thought, wow, this tool is. This tool gets me. For people who like to have a lot of tabs open me, they actually have a feature called the Tray in ClickUp that is built to work a lot like tabs. So if you were to open a task or click on it here, there is this option to send to tray and I'm actually going to do it on this one. You'll see it pop up at the bottom. I did it from the click the three dots here, but I'm also can open a task and do it from there. So for this task, they actually don't have it in the three dots here. It's a little bit confusing why it's not here in this one, but you actually need to go over to the X and there's a minimize task button which takes it down to the tray. This tray area is super cool because you can rearrange it and access tasks no matter where you are. If I were to go over to dashboards, if I were going to one of these other spaces, these tasks would follow me just like tabs, So I could jump right back into whatever I was working on, which I love. I can exit out of these. And it doesn't delete them, it just puts them back where they are and gets rid of that quick reference spot. The other thing hidden in the corner here is this handy dandy plus, which allows you to create a whole bunch of cool things, including stuff that you've already seen, reminders, notepad, docs, stuff that you'd expect, and then this cool little feature called Clips, which I believe came out about two weeks ago. Still very, very new. Basically, it's ClickUp's attempt at being loom or like the tool I'm using, Dubb. It allows you to create screen shares inside ClickUp to then paste in ClickUp or elsewhere. It's pretty cool tool built in. I think it's still in its early days, so it's going to get a lot better, but why not have that there too? So, yeah, that is the basics of ClickUp. I just showed you the tip of the iceberg here. There is so much more that you can start playing with to build to build different spreadsheets and databases that feel more and more like spreadsheets or like airtable sheets. We're going to keep it basic for now, but as I'm clicking around in the background, you can kind of see that there's a lot more that's possible while you are working in ClickUp to make it exactly what you need it to be. What I love about ClickUp as a tool, compared to some competitors that you might be considering, is that it allows you to make it work the way you want to. So if you're working in Trello, you are stuck in a Kanban view. If you are working in Asana, you're most likely working in List view. But what's nice about ClickUp is it has a lot of customization that makes you that allows you to make things in your own way. So for example, I have this grouped right now by statuses if I want to again, maybe assign it to. I don't think I have any assignees. Let's assign some of these to me, which I have a keyboard command for, which is nice. If I were to group these by assignee, I could then look at the same information in a totally different way. And that took what, a minute or so? That is the kind of stuff that is hard to do when you're using more rigid tools like Trello or Asana or even Monday. Because I'm able to modify things so easily, I can really change the way that I work. I'm clicking a quick keyboard command here to assign things to me. So that is ClickUp in a nutshell. I didn't go into any of the actual functionality. I didn't teach you anything today, but hopefully I gave you kind of a gut check on how the tool works and who the tool might be a good fit for. This is very, very high level. But if the stuff you see is exciting to you and feels like something that you would love, if you're someone that likes Excel spreadsheets, if you like Airtable, if you like data, if you like control, if you like really rigid organization, or if you like flexible organization but you like to be the one setting it all up, ClickUp is probably a good choice for you. If you enjoy organizing things, ClickUp is definitely going to be a good tool for you. If you are someone that doesn't do well with a blank slate, ClickUp may or may not be a good tool for you. You may need to hire somebody to help you set it up. And that's a really good segue. That's kind of what I do. So I work with people to set up ClickUp as well as holistic tech setups of all the other pieces you need to run your small business so you can actually focus on working within the tool, not about setting it up perfectly. I have some other videos. Regardless of whether you're diying or working with somebody, I have some other videos that are coming out to teach you more about the details of the setup, the pros and cons of putting your clients as folders versus putting each client as a list and things like that. So if you have questions like that please leave these in the comments. But today I just wanted to answer that gut check answer of is ClickUp something I should look into or not? If you have any other questions feel free to leave them below but I think I'm going to leave it at there for this video. Thank you so much for watching again my name is Laila. If you like this video and like to see more stuff like this whole bunch of ClickUp videos are going to be coming out soon. All you have to do is click the bell at the bottom which I should even like move my face near it somewhere down here. Click the bell subscribe. Click it twice to get that notification and make sure that you are subscribed so you can get all the updates as new videos are coming out which again should be very soon. So thanks for watching and have a good one.
