Slack vs. ClickUp: Stop burying critical conversations in the wrong tool

Let's go.

I think that might have recorded. Hello, hello, hello everyone and welcome to the Zen Pilot live show. It's so good to be coming to you again live from the Zen Pilot studio. Well, not really, but from our respective studios here in Poland and the US My guest today is Maggie Kernarins, your friendly neighborhood clan coach here at Zen Pilot. Maggie, how are you doing today?

I'm just dandy. I'm caffeinated. I am ready. I am very passionate about this subject. So there will be some lively conversation today, Kuba?

Yeah, yeah, I think there just might be. There just might be. I mean, the origin story behind this live Stream was your LinkedIn post where you got like over 200 reactions talking about, you know, which communication to keep in Slack, what to keep in ClickUp. Basically saying too much is in Slack, not enough in ClickUp. That's what we'll be digging into here today. But first, a little bit of housekeeping, everyone. First and foremost, dear watchers and listeners, thank you so, so, so much for joining us here today for the zenpilot live show. Or if you're watching the recording. Thank you for spending time with us. Anyway. Now, first and foremost, if you are watching live, let us know that you can hear us and that you can see us. If it's not your first time here, you know that I always ask for that. This is getting recorded. So we want to know that the audio and video is coming in loud and clear and all. Nice. I already see the first comment here from Ivo saying, hello everyone. Hello Ivo. Thank you so much. We need more. Okay, give us your comments, tell us where you're watching or listening from and let us know. Okay, we're coming to you live on LinkedIn and YouTube so we need to see from both platforms at the very least. While I wait for that to come in. Maggie, as a first taste, I wanted to ask you, people are joining in. Who do you hope will be tuning in today? What kind of person and what kind of situation will benefit the most from listening to this conversation? I mean, listening, hopefully also participating, commenting, asking questions. Who will benefit the most?

Yeah, literally everyone. Even though we're going to be referencing Slack a lot, just because that's what most people, that's what we use, that's what most of our clients use. Anyone who has a PM tool and then also an external like instant messaging platform type of tool, everything that we say today will be applicable to them as well. But this is really important for like operations, leads within companies, but also the end user, the individuals that are doing the real work of agencies or whomever. This is not just agency specific. Anybody who has anything to say should be watching.

Okay. Yeah, excellent, excellent. Thank you for mentioning that. And it's important to mention here that we are talking like the title for this is Slack versus ClickUp. Somehow people gravitate towards these phrases where it's like tool versus tool. But honestly, you might be on Monday and teams, you might be on Asana and I can't come up with a third communication platform. Discord. Let's say you're using Discord. Okay, well, still, yeah, I mean, I've seen it, I've heard of it. People using Discord as their kind of main company communication platform. It's a thing.

Fascinating.

Yeah, yeah, there you go. So that might even in that kind of case, you know, it's two different types of tools and we're here to talk a little bit about how they can work together and also kind of the best practices and the habits you should be aiming to build here. But okay, without further ado, what I wanted to get to next is to you watchers and listeners. Let us know because, you know, we're coming here live and we wanted to kind of serve your needs the most. So let us know about your current setup, your current needs. You know, if you've got a certain question that you want answered here today, definitely drop it in the comments. The Q and A will be continuous so, you know, you don't have to wait for like a Q and A section at the end. This is a live stream. Let's chat. But definitely let us know kind of are you on ClickUp, Slack, et cetera, or are you on a different kind of tech stack right now? What are you struggling with the most so we can focus on that the most for you? I've got one thing here and I'm going to just read it out from my notes. Before the stream, I was chatting with somebody. You know, somebody replied to my first class operations newsletter and basically described their situation. I just need to find that. So they said something like this and I think this is a situation that's kind of going to resonate with a lot of people. So our team uses Slack. I'm reading the quote now from that person and thank you, that person, if they're watching for sending that email. So our team uses Slack and ClickUp. Most of the team's communication is done on Slack and then the actual work is done in ClickUp. This results in ClickUp not having enough info as required as all the discussions are done in Slack. And this person mentioned I wanted to know how we could migrate project Talk into ClickUp and the best scenarios to have conversations in Slack. If that sounds like you, this is the perfect live stream for you. Meanwhile, Amy saying the tech stack is ClickUp in Slack and Livia. Hi Livia, nice to see you. Here again is saying we're on ClickUp and Zoom felt this webinar would still be applicable. Definitely yes. Definitely yes. Okay, great. I don't want to spend too, too, too, too much time on context. I want as much of this as possible to be about kind of the brunt of the conversation, the best practices, et cetera. But first, Maggie, I wanted to ask you kind of why do you think, okay, let me set the context kind of more broadly. I mean, you posted about this, you got over 200 reactions on, you know, this. It might seem like a tactical thing, you know, where to keep comms, which tool to keep them in. But why do you think there was such a strong reaction to this topic of what to keep in ClickUp, what to keep in Slack? Why are people passionate about this problem? You know, is it symptomatic of something broader? Tell us, you know, why do you think people care so much?

Yeah, that's a great question. Great way to start this. There's. I don't. Symptom is a strong word, but I, I want to take a moment and kind of like recognize how remote work culture and the ability for us to communicate across the entire planet is a wonderful thing. It has opened up and broadened accessibility for a whole new group of people to be engaged in the workplace in a way that was not possible prior to any sort of Internet based communication tools. I remember, you know, it just wasn't possible. And so there are wonderful benefits to having something like Slack utilized within a company or teams or, you know, all the other things that people are talking about in the chat. However, there is a purpose for those instant communication tools and there's a purpose for project management platforms. And because we are such an instantaneous culture like my phone beeps, I need to pick it up, I need to respond to it. I get an email, I need to read it, I need to respond to it. The instantaneous culture that we've all been burning into our brains since AOL Instant messenger was invented has become pervasive inside of the professional environment as well. And we have zero patience as human beings. It's been completely bred out of us at this point. So something like Slack feels very convenient and accessible for a lot of people. And so it is the quickest way to solve or get a question answered. But we're not taking the time to consider what is the point of that question? What are we going to do with that answer? Who else needs to know this answer? And so it's a combination of wanting everything as quick as humanly possible and lacking the discipline to know when that's not necessary.

Yes, I love how you're setting the stage here because this, to me feels like a story of, you know, the quick way versus the right way in terms of communication. And it is true. I was chatting with Jeff, actually, I hope you don't mind me mentioning Jeff here just the other day, where it's like I mentioned to him that, you know, the way these two tools feel is that like ClickUp feels like somebody's leaving something on your desk. You can address it, you know, in a moment, you can address it, you know, once you're done with your current thing. But Slack feels almost like somebody's coming up to you and tapping you on your shoulder, you know, and it's like you really feel that impulse, especially when somebody tags you or DMs you. You really feel that impulse to respond immediately, to help them immediately, even though the better way might be to do something more asynchronous or more permanent in a different tool. Exactly. So just as a pause here, I wanted to mention some more people mentioning their tech stacks. Sarah is saying ClickUp and teams, Eva was on teams as well, and Julie is saying onboarding ClickUp soon and wondering about best practices of using these two tools together. Awesome. Awesome. Another ClickUp convert. Love to see it. We certainly do. And surprisingly, a lot of people on teams here. Okay, so continue to mention your tech stack. Continue to mention, please, dear watchers and listeners, your particular problems, particular things that you would like to discuss or particular cases. We're here to take a look at them. But as we wait for the specific questions to roll in, I didn't want to wait too long here to kind of start delivering the goods. So, Maggie, I mean, you've got definitely, you know, the experience, the expertise to talk about this through your work with Send Pilot clients and otherwise. And, you know, I'm sure you must have had many conversations about the culture around using Slack and ClickUp, so lay it on us. What are the best practices here for using Slack versus ClickUp? What are your rules around using using those? What are the common mistakes that you see and what are the first things to address here?

Yeah, so one of the comments that I replied to in the original LinkedIn post, I basically. Hello from Serbia. Hello.

Hi Marina. Nice of you to join us.

I basically laid it out in like a four step decision tree. If it's a task, if you're about to have a conversation or ask a question of somebody and the task is already inside of ClickUp, that conversation should be happening inside of ClickUp. If you're about to ask somebody a question in Slack that if a task in ClickUp existed, you would have otherwise asked that question in ClickUp, then you need to create a task and put it in ClickUp. If the message you're about to send in Slack needs to be known information by more than just you and that one person, even if it's in a public channel, you need to add it to ClickUp. And if the Slack conversation you're about to send can be answered in two or three back and forths and it's not necessarily tied to progressing a project forward, then you can put it in Slack. Still, I would recommend that most conversations you're having are happening in a public channel in Slack. Otherwise it should be in ClickUp. It should be whatever your PM tool is. Slack is not an archival resource. Slack is a bunch of post it notes that are going to get blown off in the wind the moment the air conditioning turns on. ClickUp. And hopefully whatever PM tool you're using is meant to be the communication hub for your projects. So if you have something to say or ask about the project, it should be where the project work is getting done. I have seen companies that have created Slack channels for every single project that they're doing, and then their sidebar inside of Slack is like a meter long. And that sounds horrific to me. It's wildly unorganized. It's unstructured. Conversations are either happening in individual messages or people are threading conversations and stuff gets buried. Every conversation gets rolled out and when new conversations come in, that's just overwhelmingly disorganized. But something like ClickUp, where you have the ability to leave a task on a comment at the parent task level, then you have a legacy of that information inside of the PM tool that you can reference at any time, even after the project has been closed, you can still go back and get it. You can still reference it. You can activate the information that you're sharing inside of ClickUp by turning things into tasks, even from the comment section. And so in terms of best practices, basically just, just put it in ClickUp. Put it in your PM tool.

Yeah, yeah. And you know, there's obviously more nuance and kind of edge cases that we can and will get into here. That's kind of the point to go kind of deeper than we normally would and certainly deeper than one LinkedIn post can go. But these are the general rules as Maggie laid them out. Something's already resonating here, Amy saying Slack is not an archival resource. Love this. And I did want to dig into that a little bit deeper if time permits, a little bit later. But first, you touched upon something that I personally struggled with a lot when I was more of a ClickUp newbie. And that is the parent task versus subtask issue in ClickUp. And I think it's worth emphasizing and I wish, you know, I would like to ask you to say more about like okay, within ClickUp, where do you leave the comments so that they don't get buried? You mentioned in parent Tasks, you know, for people who aren't familiar with our nomenclature. Could you expand on that?

Yeah. So within ClickUp you have the ability to have a parent task, a subtask, a nested subtask. By the way, don't ever use nested subtasks. Having the conversation all live at the parent task level. So anybody can reference that information, regardless of what they're assigned to or accountable for for that particular project, can all reference everything that's being talked about at the parent task level. That's what I mean by treating it as a communication hub. So every single one of your deliverables, a parent task, needs to be where all the conversation is happening. So typically within a Zen Pilot approved task template, your parent task is going to just simply be the name of the deliverable blog October 2023 or I guess it's November Thanksgiving Buffet. Okay, all the subtasks underneath that are like Brainstorm, Draft, Review, Edit, Create, Imagery. All those individual steps are your subtasks that are all assigned to the individual accountable for doing that activity. However, as you are checking these things off and completing these individual subtasks, they are removed from view. They still live in ClickUp, but they're no longer quickly accessible. So any conversation that you had on that subtask is now gone. However, if you keep your conversation at the parent task level, all information, all attachments, all comments, all concerns will be open and accessible for as long as that task is open for as long as that parent task is open. And in Zen Pilot land, that means the parent task is open until that final final subtask is closed. And that final final subtask is like not. It's not Publish the blog post. It's like, pull the reports from how successful that blog post was so you still have this whole pile of information for the lifetime of that project. Using the parent task as a communication hub means information is accessible to everyone all the time. And if you have the discipline to follow that particular methodology for communicating within your PM tool, and everybody follows it, everybody knows where to look every time, regardless of client, regardless of deliverable. If you're using ClickUp in the same way for every, you know, way that you interact with the tool, then this waste of time trying to find information is eradicated. You know where to look, you know where to find it, you know what to expect.

Yeah, that's gold. All of that. And I just wanted to mention, maybe tackle a potential objection here right off the bat because I've heard this criticism of ClickUp many times where it's like, yeah, there's too many places to bury things and subtask comments were the number one culprit here. And what I just wanted to emphasize here is that you might be thinking, why can't subtasks have comments in the first place then? And this is where we get into the realms of okay, ClickUp offers a lot of flexibility in some places, almost too much. Right? But here's the thing with Slack, it's the same. You also have, you know, habits you need to build to use Slack. Right? And one of the top tips is, for example, keep, you know, when you go deeper into a topic, keep it within a Slack thread and don't put too much clutter in kind of the main Slack channel. Right? And if you've got a Slack newbie, they're going to put everything in the main channel. So use threads is the tip for Slack and keep comments in the parent task is the tip for ClickUp. And you know, turns out that both tools just need some additional layer of training and alignment really on expectations to get the most out of them and to avoid chaos here we've got a comment coming in. I want to highlight it. Julie saying great tip about utilizing the parent task for comms and why using subtasks is not a good idea for the reasons you gave. Well, to be clear, it's not just. It's not not using subtasks at all, but not for, for keeping comments in them.

Yeah, if you, if you're following the parent task as a communication hub philosophy, subtasks are largely then only for assigning work and tracking your time. So if you are in agreement and the entire agency or business adopts this Communication practice then being able to say like to quickly divide purpose, parent task is for communication, subtask is for assignees. And time tracking that mental split becomes extremely simple to adopt.

Yeah, you know what I'm noticing Maggie, you need to give me a second here because I'm noticing that we're getting some more comments just directly on LinkedIn and I'm not seeing them on Streamyard. I just noticed that, that we have something coming in here. So here's one. Do you see them too?

Okay, like I see Eleanor from London. Hello. Used to live there. She says that she uses Slack and it's hard to find past conversations. Exactly.

Yeah, that's one. And then there's Julia here saying and hey, this is a perfect question. I have another one of mine kind of teed up. But we'll get to that in a second audience first saying how to overcome the thing that it's easier or quicker to write something down in Slack. Asking directly for something. That is a great question. How to overcome that, Maggie?

Yeah, I think, Julia, when you are considering like the end game that you're playing here, are you trying to solve a simple problem right now or are you trying to create a solution that will make your life easier long term? That's the whole instantaneous gratification thing you have to overcome, which is exceedingly difficult because there's nowhere else in our lives right now where we are being taught to be patient. Food shows up at your front door. Your groceries show up at your front door. You can get a doctor appointment right there on your computer screen in the middle of the workday. Like instantaneous gratification is everywhere, but it's not a long term success plan when you are thinking about, you know, how to convey information, how to save information. Now I understand, like let's say you're on a call with a client and they ask you a question and you're like, oh, I love that question for you. Let me consult. Like in that moment you. Okay A, you probably shouldn't be on slack during client calls anyway. But let's say you panicked and you're like, you could get in Slack temporarily to be like yo, slow Solutions team, what is that? And they could provide you a quick answer in Slack because you are about to lose your mind on a client call. But then after you get off that client call, you need to be diligent enough to record that answer in a place for long term keeping and reference. So overcoming the easier, quicker benefit of Slack has to be counteracted with the long term Benefit of keeping conversation in the correct PM tool.

Yeah, exactly. And in that sense, Slack becomes almost like an escalation channel where it's like, okay, something is on Slack. That means somebody is tapping me on my shoulder and needs a reaction quicker. But it's being overused for, you know, a lot of conversations that really could be left on your desk, meaning they could be in ClickUp. And I love the food analogy too, because that came to my mind as well, where it's like, okay, I mean, you can get fed fast with like, you know, fast food, for example, but really for long term health, you should be cooking meals, blah, blah, blah. We're calling everyone here to be just a little bit more virtuous, I guess, with their communication for the long term benefits of it, you know, did I go too far? Kind of. More. Anyway, anyway, yeah.

And in terms of like, like trying to stop that need for instant gratification or instant answers, I just think about, like, how distracting it is to me when somebody lobs a question over to me in Slack when I otherwise could be like, could you put that in ClickUp? Like, I don't want to be the problem in somebody else's poorly focused life. I want to be. Also, if I want people to communicate with me in a slow and methodical way, I also have to be the person who communicates in a slow and methodical way. So it's also keeping each other accountable. Once you've decided how you want to exchange information within your organization, if somebody is still using Slack, then you have to overcome that behavior by redirecting people. It's. It takes a lot of practice and it's not a quick change, but it is a change that is worth making.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And there's a lot of activity in the comments for this one, so bear with us as we try to kind of keep up here. Let's see. Okay, let's do one clarification about something that we were talking about a minute ago. Amy is asking, are you saying to not put any comments in subtasks? What about conversations around the subtask deliverable that not everyone needs to know?

Maggie, who decides what people need to know and what can be beneficial for the larger group? I mean, what if you're working on the blog post and the client has provided you with edits, and if you are communicating those edits to the copywriter in their individual subtask, then the people who come after you won't have any sort of context as to what the client requested. That would be a bummer that would be a loss in terms of communication and consistency. I'm sure there are instances where you truly only need to communicate with one person inside of ClickUp. And that's all well and good, but I don't. I personally have never been overwhelmed by a volume of comments in a task because typically a parent task has a fairly short lifespan. It's not like we've got parent tasks that start in January with a subtask that goes through August. That would be the world's largest task template. And that will. That greatly reduces the. The. The length of comments that can be loaded into a task. So that's not a huge concern and not something that I've seen people struggle with, but I would really challenge the thought behind that. Not everybody needs to know, like, who's determining the value of the conversation and whether or not truly only two people need to know what's going on.

Yeah, and on top of that, it's just a simpler rule this way. It's just simpler to follow. Just put everything in the parent task. Otherwise you spend so much mental energy just thinking, okay, is this important enough or, you know, the thread started out innocently enough, but now we're sharing info that's important to the holder of bol. Not just to this step. It's better to just stick to a simple rule here. You know, following the kind of the KISS principle. Keep it simple, silly. All right, Livia left a nice comment about the left on your desk analogy. Thank you, Livia. That's awesome of you to mention. Okay. I wanted to weave one of mine here because it's kind of a curveball that I think is relevant to just the comments that we mentioned just now. And we'll get to the rest here as well. Here's a scenario. What about. You're talking like, okay, for context, within the Zen Pilot methodology, you've got the client folder. Under those client folders, you've got lists that are supposed to represent, I think, the newest iterations, like contracts for particular services. Right. So you might have an SEO list, you might have a, I don't know, content management list or organic content, whichever. So let's say I'm in the parent task for a blog post and I'm starting some sort of discussion there about the blog post. All of a sudden, within this discussion, something pops up that becomes pertinent to the client at large there. It almost feels like it needs to kind of go a level further up the chain. What would you do with such a case? Where would you kind of save that information so that it can be easily referenced so that you don't have to remember that. Hey, for this blog post, something important was mentioned about the client. Like, how would you address that?

Great question. So there's two different possible answers I can give you. Let me think for 12 seconds before I respond out loud. Okay, so there's two ways I could suggest going about this, and I'd actually love to hear what our solutions team thinks of my answer. So if our solutions team is chiming in. Okay, Number one, every list, every contract list within a client folder where you are executing the actual work should have a corresponding contract record in a another location within ClickUp, something that we call our client related records folder. And so if there's a note that needs to be known about the contract as a whole, Alex is always watching. Alex, our solutions team member, has just chimed in to let me know that he's watching and listening to the words that are about to come out of my mouth. And if he disagrees with what I say, he will let us all know. Thanks, Alex.

Thanks, Alex.

Number one, I would leave a record, I would leave a comment on the contract record itself. Now, there's a difference between a record and a task. A record holds information. A task is where work gets done. So when you are executing work for a contract which typically has more than one deliverable, that contract's gonna likely outlive the task. It's gonna be. It's gonna have a longer lifespan than just that one individual deliverable. So I would leave a comment on that contract record. So any other deliverables that are part of that contract can be notified or aware of a broader note. You could also leave information like that in the client folder. When Zenpilot is building out your client folders where the work gets done, we also include a templatized document that is meant to be a warehouse of information for the client as well. And there's much like there's only much like we utilize a parent task as a communication hub inside of ClickUp. We utilize one doc for every client. Now, that doc can have subpages, but there is only one doc for that client. And so if there is information that needs to be referenced about the client as a whole, it can go into that client doc location. So you've got the ability to reference it either in the contract record which will outlive the deliverable and can be referenced in the future, or you can leave it in that client document which will outlive the contract. You're going to have A client folder for as long as that client is working with you. So if you've got more than one contract for that particular client, that client doc in the folder itself is the longest living source of information for that particular client.

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, if it turns out, what I'm envisioning is if it turns out, again, you're discussing a blog post, something important about a client pops up. You can always do, you know, links both ways. Okay. It seems like this is important in the broader context. I left the answer here. Look. And you've got the. Okay, awesome. I see you headbanging.

I love that banging.

Okay, so you know, you can, you can do that. And Alex responded with.

Alex gave us the stamp of approval. My answer was right.

Okay, awesome. Okay, awesome. I love that. Okay, I'm trying to. Let me just orient myself here for a second, trying to keep up with all the. Abdullah, you've got one question that's like really, really good. I want to give it the right space. So we'll kind of exit the whole threads comments thing first and then get into kind of the broader issue that you were touching upon. Tom, you asked about the recording. I left you a comment. But, you know, for anybody else watching, the recording is here. Okay. The same link which you're watching under is going to be where the recording lives. That applies both to LinkedIn and YouTube. So don't worry about that at all. Okay. So last one I'm seeing from the submitted ones is Sarah's asking, do you find that comments or threaded comments and ClickUp become hard to navigate when they get super long? Have we already answered this to a point?

Sort of. And I made the comment, Sarah, that like, deliverables don't have an extremely long lifespan. Like, if you've got a huge project and it's, you know, it does actually take 12 months to complete a contract, you're going to have a boatload of parent tasks. You're going to have a boatload of deliverables. And so the, the length of the comment thread is really confined just to that one deliverables parent task. So again, like, I've never seen it where it just becomes like grossly overwhelming where you have too many tasks, too many comments. In ClickUp's search bar, you can search through comments. And even in the new task 3.0 view within ClickUp, you can use the magnifying glass and search through all the activity that's happening in that task. So you can use either the global search feature inside of ClickUp or that one Tasks specific search bar so you can go look through all of the activity. So there, there's a, a, I want to say a counter argument, but I'm not arguing with Sarah, I'm just telling her that there's a feature for that that you can search comments so them being long and unwieldy is not really a problem.

Yeah, yeah. And I didn't even know that, that there's a, like a separate search for a particular task.

Meanwhile, and what Alex just said, if a. Yes. If a deliverable has a button of butt tonight, that's a professional metric. If a deliverable has a butt ton of context like in that comment view, you can use AIs. The ClickUp AI, it now has the ability to create a summary of all the activity that's been loaded into that task, which is gold. If you are trying to like, let's say that things have gone horribly awry and you need to communicate with your leadership team about what happened. If you're using the activity feed in the comments on the parent task to keep everybody up to date, if you hit that summary tool, it will summarize what went well, what didn't go well, and then you can present that to your leadership team versus like sending them a transcript of activity from the task.

Yeah. Maggie, how many bot loads in a bot tonight?

5.

Okay, okay, new metric coin. We got that now. Okay, awesome. Let's get to Abdullah's question finally, because we were also supposed to touch upon ClickUp notifications. That's another kind of big ish rock to touch upon here. But first, the culture stuff here, it's about clients, but I think we can talk more broadly about, you know, change management and kind of convincing people to be on board with these, you know, new modify roles. But first, Abdullah's question, as stated, then how do you guys deal with clients who are like, oh, we have a culture to keep. We cannot force people to add comments in ClickUp because our culture doesn't allow to put such boundaries. I feel like this might be kind of from a vendor client relationship standpoint. But anyway, Maggie, I'll let you answer.

Yeah, my initial reaction to that question is what other boundaries does the agency not have and maintain that is allowing their team to not perform at top of license? If your team doesn't have boundaries in terms of how they're communicating about client work or even internal work, they're probably not tracking time. They're probably not contributing any meaningful information to the data and reports necessary to ensure your business is actually running well. So that question about boundaries and using culture as an excuse for not getting better about something is a weak argument. However, to address the actual question, I always try and position any sort of behavior change as a benefit to the end user. So if you are trying to convince a whole bunch of people to start using ClickUp and pretend like Slack doesn't exist, you have to explain to them why it's a benefit. You could simply say to them like, we know that our team spends 20% of their time every single week simply trying to find information about what needs to get done. 20% of time across an entire agency's team is a astronomical amount of time. Even if it's only 10%, that is hours and hours every week. And so if you can say to somebody like, you're going to be a lot more efficient and you're going to be a lot less stressed and you're going to feel a whole lot more informed and involved and connected to the work that you're doing, if you can actually find the information necessary in the same place every single time. If you're trying to tell them that, like keeping communication in the parent task means that our clients will end up with a better product, your end user may not care as much about that. We are all, not only do we have short attention spans, we're all remarkably selfish. And so having to position any sort of behavior change needed has to be positioned as a benefit to each individual.

Yes, I'm going to try and piggyback off of that. Speaking of benefits to the end user, you mentioned the amount of time that's spent communicating. And wouldn't you rather that this heap of time that's spent communicating is spent on communicating in a way that also builds your company's knowledge base, builds its second brain, if you will. And I think this is an argument that would speak to a client too. I mean, you're working with us as an agency for X amount of time, probably not forever. Wouldn't you rather keep relevant communication within a place that's archivable so that if we ever part ways, you've still got everything you've got from us in terms of knowledge. You can still access that. And actually I wanted to tee up something from you, Maggie, here. Why don't you tell our watchers at this point about kind of. This is something that fascinated me when I saw this built in our ClickUp instance, kind of the Q and A section, the way we handle Q and A with clients now, maybe as inspiration for others watching. You know that it is possible to Handle things that way. I know. It's also closely integrated with Slack. Like when we get questions and answer them, that lives in ClickUp right now. Right. We try to keep it as much as, I mean, have the MIC tell people about that.

Yeah. So the what our magicians have built, it's an option now. It's not something that we include for all of our clients anymore, but it is something that people can tap into. We have created essentially two dimensions where one task exists. So we have our zenpilot workspace and when we're working with our clients, they have their separate workspace. However, they have a form within their workspace that they can submit a question to their client coach me, and that question will end up as a task in my workspace. And so now we've got one task that lives in two different dimensions. There is a bug one task that lives in two different dimensions and we can comment back and forth to each other so they'll receive my response in their workspace despite the fact that I am responding in my workspace. And this is entirely for the benefit of the client. They keep all of their questions and answers in their workspace even when our implementation is over and Zenpilot has been ejected from their workspace. So then they have this list of questions with Zenpilot provided answers that they and their whole team can reference for the lifetime of their workspace. And so we previously had Slack channels with our clients and then that information would get archived at the end of our engagement. And it's only accessible to the people who were on the implementation team, which is normally like 5% of the entire company. And so that information was kept hidden away from everybody. Now with this multi dimensional portal situation, everybody can have access to their FAQs that were answered by Zen Pilot client coaches. So it's. I've, I've heard really good things about it. Our clients appreciate it. They love being able to communicate back and forth with us. Like I said, it's not something that's included with all of our implementations, but it is a huge benefit to people to have that legacy of information somewhere that's accessible to the whole team and not just hidden away in Slack.

Yeah, exactly. And it's kind of taking this long term mindset to its logical conclusion. Like, why not keep the stuff that usually would be in Slack even more of it in ClickUp so that it's archivable, it can be referenced later on. It builds this kind of base of knowledge that lives even past the engagement. Excellent. And wow, some people in the comments are saying are kind of responding quite positively to that. Love to see that. Thank you. Marina Abdullah.

It's something that can be done internally too. Like it doesn't necessarily have to be with just like your vendor. If you have a solutions team, if you have a client management team and you need to know something about how something gets done, you can absolutely create a form inside of your own workspace that generates a question for somebody to answer. And so then everybody benefits out from that long term repository of information.

Exactly. And you know, with AI in the mix, I would say, you know, if you build this Q and A system for you and you've got, you know, a heap of answers to questions that may kind of be similar, but still you've got this raw data feeding it into some sort of GPT, you can easily build a bot that then responds to any future questions. Like, the possibilities here are huge. But anyway, we're kind of getting off track here, just, just a tiny little bit. So we've got 15 minutes on the clock here. I don't know how that happened. That time is flying by so fast. We basically can get into, I think one of two things unless we kind of speed run those. Let's talk about notifications. Just because I saw a lot of comments about that, let me paint kind of the picture. The objection that usually shows up is that, okay, I would use ClickUp more, but the notifications suck. They either don't show up enough or there's way too much of them. I mean, when it's a new ClickUp instance, like with most SaaS products, it's like you get an email for everything at the beginning. Talk a little bit about kind of the optimal setup here and you know, like, how are there some kind of ground rules about setting up ClickUp notifications to, you know, to get them as close to the quality of. Of, for example, Slack notifications. Just what are the best practices here?

Yeah, first and foremost, now's the time when I say, if you would like to see what I'm about to talk about, leave a comment here that says notifications and we will respond to you via email with a screenshot of our suggested notifications. There is a optimal way to get your settings configured. I would wager a guess that most people have not taken the time to call out noisy, noise, noisy, no notifications. I would also put money on the fact that everybody in their notifications, if they're complaining about I have too many. I guarantee you they are turned on as watchers for way too much stuff if you're a watcher for something, then you're going to be notified in your notifications. When a due date changes, when somebody makes a new comment, when a custom field is updated like that is going to be cuckoo bananas. There you go, Hannah. Cuckoo bananas. So you need to go into your notifications and turn off stuff that doesn't matter. And additionally, I don't want to hear it. I don't want to hear it if somebody's like, I get notifications and emails. Well, you should be living inside of ClickUp and using your notifications as your inbox. You should not be using your Gmail for ClickUp notifications. You should be living in ClickUp. Your email should basically just be for port clients to get in touch with you about billing and invoicing. Otherwise it should be in ClickUp. So turning off your watcher settings and making sure you turn off everything else that doesn't matter. ClickUp will notify you by default when you are mentioned in a comment. When you are assigned a new task, you cannot turn that off. And those are the things that you should be notified about. However, everything else is noise. Sure, there are things that a team lead may need to be notified on, but Kuba doesn't care when my subtask is closed. He just cares that I show up to the live stream. Like people just taking the time to optimize notifications will go a long way to making your inbox more informative. Also, if you have the ability to turn on ClickUp 3.0's beta inbox versus ClickUp 2.0 notifications, I highly recommend turning on your beta box because it separates important from other. And that important Inbox is like the lifeblood of productivity inside of ClickUp.

Yes. Honestly, that was the biggest game changer for me with 3.0. When I saw that split, I was like, finally. Yes, because I mean, there's a lot of things to keep track of. There's some things that I might want to see that's, you know, something got closed. You know, that's not necessarily important to me, but the important section of it that like, that feels a lot more like, okay, on Slack, these would be the things to respond to. These would be kind of the red badges. And I finally have that on ClickUp as well. It's one of the best things that they've done. Real quick tactical note, I see a lot of comments of notifications on LinkedIn. Awesome. I will be reaching out to you. Okay, so you might see a connection request from me, then I'll send the notifications kind of reference to most likely your preferred email address. I see one comment on YouTube, I don't think I have a way of.

Yeah, we can't connect with you, buddy. So you got to find us on LinkedIn. So we can, so we can message you.

Yeah. Alternatively, if anybody wants to make this process faster, you can drop me an email at this address jakubetsunpilot.com and then I'll be sending the notifications reference either way through email. So you might as well drop me an email. But if you're on YouTube then you have to do this because otherwise I can't message you easily. Okay. Sorry if it's a little bit convoluted, but just get in touch and we'll send it. Awesome, awesome, awesome. Yeah, I think we got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 people requesting that. Good, good that we touched upon this. And then. Okay, there's one additional question that just came in. Respectfully, if we have a last couple of minutes, we'll touch upon it. But there's one kind of bigger bucket here that I wanted to also touch upon. I mean, do let me know if this is something that we already kind of talked through and there's may or may not be a lot to add here, but I wanted to spend just a little bit more time kind of on the whole change management aspect of this, you know, this whole affair. Like I think a lot of people on the stream might be in positions like, I don't know, they're a PM lead or something or you know, they're just spearheading the charge when it comes to internal communications. You know, there's a type of.

Right.

Somebody who really cares about where messages get left. You know, they're kind of systems thinkers, love those kind of people. But they need to convince the others. They need to kind of drive this whole change management initiative. What would you say to those people? You know you mentioned position it as a benefit to the end user. Is there more to think of here either, you know, tactical or high level in terms of getting others on board with the change?

Yeah. One discipline. You have to have a strong enough backbone to, to say to people like you have got to put that in ClickUp. If you have like a auto fill on your keyboard that's like you type the word ClickUp and then a message auto populates that says add this in ClickUp. Get it out of slack. That would be beneficial. I don't, I suffer from not having patience and so I don't like to Wait for people to change their behavior and sometimes I will just change it for them. Hashtag, I'm a mom. And one of the things that Zen Pilot has created to make that easier for people is a Slack to ClickUp automation. So if you've ever tried to integrate Slack and ClickUp, where you can create a task from a comment, that process is really cumbersome. I mean, it's a benefit, sure, because you can write from Slack, you can create a task to put into ClickUp. It takes no less than a solid minute to fully configure that thing. And one minute to a 23 year old who's working in an agency, that's too much time, that's too much friction. They're going to haha, it's never going to go and click up. So ZenPilot has created an automation where with this single click of an emoji, it will take everything that's in that Slack message and create a task for you. So you don't even have to transfer it from Slack to ClickUp. All of that is done for you. And that has been a game changer. When we first instituted that inside of Zen Pilot land, you saw people like adding that, that emoji everywhere. But you don't see it as much anymore because it has forced people to just start using ClickUp to begin with. It has shifted us from using Slack and putting the conversation in ClickUp because we trained ourselves to go to ClickUp to have the conversation. And so it was this beautiful bridge between bad behavior and good behavior that was so easy, like clicking a single emoji. You're assigned, you're due dated, your time estimated. It's in the right list where you designate it to go. It has all the context from the original Slack message. So then if it is something that needs to live in a client folder, all you need to do is simply move the task and everybody. It's especially helpful too, because every human being that deploys that emoji will have their own individual task. So if somebody sends out an announcement that's like fill out the company survey, everyone can go hit that emoji button and everybody will have a task to fill out. The company survey Magic.

Yes, literal unicorn, fairy, leprechaun magic, everyone.

Incredible.

Okay, so yes, and this is something, this automation is something that we can actually implement for you if you're interested. I just dropped a URL on the banner here. If you're in another tab and just listening, now would be a good time to switch to the LinkedIn or YouTube tab to view the URL zenpilot.com and I am sorry about the length Slack ClickUp automation waitlist. It's also in a comment on LinkedIn. Sorry, YouTube, but it is on LinkedIn in a comment I left it, you know, with a kind of push pin emoji. You'll find it. So there you can get on the wait list for this product and you can have this automation added to your ClickUp workspace. You know, and like Maggie mentioned, it's like it's the first step. It kind of paves the path to using ClickUp more to connecting these two systems to a larger extent. And when you make things easy, then, yes, change management becomes a lot easier with it. And with that, we've only got like four minutes on the clock left, which is amazing to me, but I feel like we've had a really productive session. So now I'm going to ask kind of the question that I never skip because it's super important for me, my insurance question. Maggie, we're about to unfortunately go off the air here, but is there anything else in this topic that I neglected to ask about that you would also want to leave the audience with? Our dear watchers and listeners who have been super active today. Thank you so much for that. And yeah, anything else? Final words, parting thoughts?

Maggie, Reading my notes, making sure I got to everything too. I. I think like the. The general rule of thumb. I don't know if I've had the opportunity to say this out loud yet, but my general rule of thumb, when people are asking like, where should this conversation live? The answer is talk about work, where work happens. And that applies to communication. That applies to where your SOPs should live or be linked. Reducing the amount of exiting the PM tool is what you should aim for. Conversation should live in ClickUp. SOPs should live in ClickUp, client records should live in ClickUp or whichever PM tool you're using so that everybody has access, everybody knows where to look every single time. It's important that there is consistency in how you communicate internally and with your clients.

Okay, awesome. That is very well put for our final thoughts here. Alrighty. Well, I guess we'll be wrapping up here then. What did I Forget? All right, CTAs. Oh gosh, the marketer almost forgot CTA. So look, you know, so this is just, you know, we tackled just one slice of this whole project management internal operations puzzle and we talked about this for an hour, which, you know, I remember before we planned this live stream, you were like, are we going to talk about this for an hour. So much more we could get into still. So this is just one slice. If you'd like to learn more to improve your communication, your operations, your project management to be more profitable as an organization, there's tons of stuff that you can get from Zenpilot right now. Go to zenpilot.com and there you'll find our ClickUp for agencies guide, our teamwork.com for agencies guide because we do. Teamwork.com too. You'll find first class operations and newsletter that I send out every two weeks with the best content that I can find from zenpilot and outside of Zenpilot to improve your operations. There's other templates there that you might get. You know, we do offer like one free template which is the client onboarding ClickUp template that also lives there. So just browse through all the goodies there. Again on LinkedIn in a comment you'll find the link to our ClickUp Slack Automation wait list. So just join that and I'll be sure to send you. We're almost ready to deploy that. It shouldn't be too much, too long of a wait. And Kristen's like, Maggie is such an enjoyable person. More Maggie content. Maggie's already a repeat guest on the show and that didn't take long at all. But yes, okay, we'll give you more Maggie content. I don't mind that at all, but Kristin, you made me lose my train of thought here. Okay, so zenpilot.com, go through all the things and yes, follow Zen pilot primarily on LinkedIn and on YouTube. This is where we put out the most stuff. This is where, you know, our LinkedIn company page shares all the posts from the personal profiles of, you know, when Maggie posts something, I post something, Jeff posts something, gray post something. You'll find that on the, on our LinkedIn company page. So it's like, like a nice aggregator of everything we do on LinkedIn in particular zenpilot.com everyone. You'll find everything there. Of course, if you want to go the fastest and best and most optimal route, you can book a call with us zenpilot.com call and you'll get to work with Maggie or one of our other client coaches to build a custom solution and kind of the best possible ClickUp setup and train your team on how to do project management. Right. Phew. That was a lot of CTAs, but hopefully not too, too much for the watchers and listeners here today. Just hit the one hour mark. Amazing session, Maggie thank you so much for coming again on the show. Do you have anything else to add or mention before I unfortunately click the end stream button here?

Spay and neuter your pets and don't forget to floss.

Awesome. Okay, thank you so much, everyone for joining us here today. And we'll see you on the next episode of the Zen Pilot live show. Have a nice one, everyone. Clicking End stream now. Bye bye.