Team overwhelmed by how to use ClickUp? Fix it!

Did you know you can see how many uncleared notifications and overdue tasks everyone in your ClickUp account has? Yeah. And if you don't know that, watch this video. If you do know that, also watch this video. Because today I want to tell you a little story, my friends, of once upon a time where Team ProcessDriven had some new team members join or people shifting roles. And I just so happened to peek into the who's behind widget, which is this guy in ClickUp, and I noticed that there were team members with astronomical amounts of uncleared notifications and overdue tasks. And this is on Team ProcessDriven, right? We make the ClickUp tutorials. How could this happen? Well, turns out we've never made a video dedicated to how to fix this exact issue. So that's what we're about to do today. The first thing we're going to cover in this video is how you can create a who's behind widget like I showed on the screen earlier. Then we're going to talk about how you can easily intervene when you see those numbers reach an unreasonable amount. And yes, we'll also talk about what an unreasonable amount is. With that, let's start off and create a who's behind widget so you can feel how I felt when we first saw those numbers. So to create a who's behind widget and figure out how many uncleared notifications and overdue tasks your team has, we're going to first go ahead and create a new dashboard. So you're going to click the little plus sign here and add a brand new dashboard. For this example, we're going to start a brand new dashboard and we are going to call it who's behind because let's just pretend who's behind is the only widget we really care about. To add this widget, we're going to type who's behind and select the widget. From here we want to choose what data we want to report on. So what locations do we care about? For most of us, we're going to care about everything. We want to know about overdues from everywhere. So we're going to include everything. The only time you might exclude things if maybe you don't want to factor in personal tasks or something like that. When it comes to our settings here, we're going to disable archived because if a task is in the past and it's archived, we probably won't hold that against people. But the rest of these we are going to leave enabled. And once we add that widget we're going to see a report of who is behind inside our workspace and how behind they are. So in this demo account, you can see that we have two Layla pompers. Weird. And we see that there are 46 uncleared notification in Layla's account here and five overdue tasks. Is that a lot? Is that a little. Let's talk about that next. Because you're going to get this big old report and you're going to look at it and you're going to say, all right, cool. What I was looking for when I first saw this coming on is who is above and below the average. That's the first thing. If there's anyone that really jumps off of the average for your account, that is someone to keep an eye on, either in a good way or a not so good way. So when it comes to these numbers and seeing them come in, what's considered good? Well, the numbers I would keep in mind is103.100 uncleared notifications as the upper limit and three overdue tasks as the upper limit. Okay. And we'll talk about each of these individually as to why they're problematic at the scale that they're at with notifications, 100 is about the number of notifications that someone can quickly clear in about 15 minutes or less. And if we see notifications spiking beyond that number, we run the risk of people basically getting ignored. The notifications could be coming from the ClickUp being updated, maybe, and someone's getting updates because they're involved with things being changed. It could be caused because someone's notification settings, which are set per. Per user, are inappropriate. Maybe they're accidentally watching far too much that they don't actually need to be seeing, and maybe that needs to be changed. However, the most common and the most dangerous reason that notifications build up is because there is no habit or accountability for clearing them. There's not an understanding as to why, why, why should I bother clearing them out? So whatever the reason, whichever of these three is causing the notifications to build up, we want to intervene for one very important reason. Trust. If we see notifications go above 100, things are going to start getting missed. It's not going to be easy to get out of that pile. So we're just going to start picking away at little things, and the pile is going to keep growing day after day after day after day. Something in that pile of notifications could be important. Likely is important. And if someone's not seeing that notification of someone commenting saying, hey, I Need your help on this. Well, whoever wrote that comment saying hey I need help is going to have less trust in the system and the person using the system. So when people say, you know, I rolled out ClickUp to my team but no one's using it, they're still emailing. One of the reasons for that is usually related to this whole notifications puzzle. If I post a comment saying, hey John, give me feedback on this, I hear nothing back. Well, I might post one more time and then I'll email you. And if the email works the next time. I have a question for John. Well, all right, I'm just going to email him because he doesn't check ClickUp. This kind of system is not what we want. If we want to have ClickUp as the efficient collaboration hub where we're talking about tasks as we're actually doing them all in the same place, we need to use comments and we need to use notifications and they need to be cleared out daily. The solution for notification overwhelm to prevent that from happening is to build good personal habits in ClickUp first. So we actually have a video on the channel called How I start my day and ClickUp, you can watch that one up here. I would check that out. It goes over kind of my daily flow. But what I would expect from most team members is that they start their day in notifications. It is the most important part of their morning routine. In my opinion. The notifications should tell you what other people are doing in your workspace. It's kind of like your morning scrum but you just reviewing the activities that have happened when you're in your notifications. What I would suggest that you do is a multi phase approach. Right? We're going to go into notifications here now. So I'm going to go through my entire list and clear out anything that's like, all right, cool, good to know, done. No action required, nothing I need to do. The next thing I'm going to do is look for any changes or updates where I might want to engage and leave a little comment. So okay, this one here, maybe I want to leave a little note saying something. Post that comment, then go back to my notifications and clear it. So phase one, clear the easy ones. Phase two, clear the ones that are pretty easy, quick, quick updates. Now inevitably when you're going through your notifications, you're going to see ones that prompt more work, right? You see this? You're like, oh man, that's something I really have to answer. That's something I need to get to later today. Rather than leaving it in your notifications, which is a temptation we've all faced, I would suggest using a feature like tray. Take this task, add it to your tray, which is on the bottom of your account right here, and have that as your kind of pile of papers on your desk to work through in the day. Clear the notification and treat this as kind of your action items for the day. Keep going through. Okay. Oh, this how to ask questions, this one. I really want to make sure that I send a tray because I want to make sure I take care of that later. I'll put that as higher priority because of whatever I'm going to drag these around. So my tray is my order for the day. My notifications are just letting me know what's going on. Clear out all your notifications. That's it. Repeat that process for every single task that you have in here. Or if you're really, really bad and you don't want to look through it, you can also click Clear all. Eventually you will see the confetti pop and you will see some kind of inspiring quote and you'll be cleared with your notifications. Repeat that daily. And for most people, I would actually recommend doing this twice a day. Once in the morning, once after lunch, or once in the morning, once at the end of the day. If you're a manager where your primary duty is to help other people do their job, the number of times you check notifications is probably going to increase. I would aim for three to four times a day if that is your role. If you were just a doer, though, if you're like, I'm in the zone, I'm editing videos. One to two times a day is more than enough in most teams. So that's notifications, why they matter, what to look for and how to fix them. Number one thing is the daily habit. Now, overdos are a little bit more straightforward, so it might be a bit of a shorter conversation here. But in my opinion, 3 overdos is about the maximum that we want to plan. When you set a due date on a task, that is a promise, that's a commitment. So if you've watched my video about separating ideas from tasks, it's an oldie but goodie over here. You know what I'm talking about. But I'm a really big believer in things that could be tasks. Go in one pile and when you decide they're actually a good idea and you actually are going to commit to executing them right now, then we add a due date, Then we add an Assignee and then we commit to doing it when we can actually forecast, do I have the time? This kind of method often means that we only plan a few weeks in ahead rather than a few years ahead. We don't put due dates out crazy far because we can't predict that far out. The reason I say overdue tasks should stay at 3 or lower is because any more than that and it honestly just becomes very overwhelming in ClickUp. If we are treating due dates as a commitment, as a promise. If you start to have a pileup of more than three tasks, unless they're super small, that can really start to cause issues in other places of the workspace. So three would be the number where I would say, if you see anything, hit that or go above like this one here, reach out to that person privately and intervene. Odds are they are over capacity in some way. They aren't able to get to it because something has come up and they need help. Overdue tasks are often a sign that people need help. The other reason that you might have overdue tasks is because tasks are being improperly scoped. So you might have a task that equals a two month project. Well, that's quite large and hard to estimate. So one thing we can do is break tasks down into smaller pieces and put due dates on those smaller pieces. So our accuracy of dating our tasks is more accurate. There's a lot we can do here on the task side, but most often if it's an individual with a spike of overdue tasks, you're dealing with performance issues on that person, or more commonly, workload issues with that person where they are drowning for some reason or another. So conversations in private are usually the best solution for that overdue tasks, if you have the team culture for it. Perhaps even mentioning this in a team meeting saying, hey, Layla, looks like you might be drowning. Are you doing okay? Can we help in your daily scrum? Or your standup? That could be really useful, but conversations would be the first line. However, if overdue tasks are the norm and not the exception, meaning everybody has overdue tasks of at least three. In that case, let's not throw stones in glass houses. That case, there's probably a systemic issue with your capacity defense system, meaning how your whole team decides what do we put due dates on? Which is fine, we can fix that. We actually have a video on it right here. So if you are someone who feels that overdue tasks are a team issue, watch this. Now, as I said at the beginning, this video is inspired by an actual event that happened at processdriven where we saw that, oh my gosh, things were spiking and we didn't want them to keep spiking. And what we did is this information that we're sharing right here. Someone on the team shared in our team meeting. She walked through how she started her day, where she clears things out, defined exactly what we're talking about here in this video so that each, each team member has a frame of reference for why notifications matter, how they can clear them. And I think the whole tour probably took about 15 minutes in a team meeting, which, you know, that can be a lot in a team meeting to commit the team to focusing on that. But since then, just one week later, the number of overdues, the number of uncleared notifications have plummeted down to healthy regions and are continuing to go down. And I think it's a good, it's a good testament for how just talking about something and calling attention to it can go a long way. When you have the right people, they want to do the right thing, but often just don't know why certain things matter. So bring this to their attention. Make it clear that this is a priority for your team by mentioning it, by talking about it, by looking at it, and things from there kind of can just come together. If you have any questions about this or if you have related issues that you found inside your ClickUp setup like, I can't get my team to do this or man, we're all confused with this, let me know in the comments below. I would love to do a part two or continuing series about these kinds of, I don't want to say personal challenges, but getting the people to work the system, that is a really hard part of implementing ClickUp that doesn't get enough airtime. So if you have any questions along that line, let me know in the comments below. Or just say hi as always, like and subscribe while you're down there. Thanks so much for watching. Until next time. Enjoy the process. Sam.