The #1 Way to Effectively Manage Your ClickUp Workspace

If you've successfully implemented ClickUp, congratulations. But let me tell you, this is only the beginning. In order to see success with your brand new project management system, you're gonna need a ClickUp champion to monitor your team's performance on a daily basis. This will help you create a culture of accountability and help your teams build the healthy habits that they need to make sure that your investment is worth it. So in this tutorial, I'm gonna walk you through our process that we use to manage our ClickUp workspace on a daily basis. And if at any point during this video, you just want to hit the easy button, have my team lead you through this process and help you manage your ClickUp workspace for you, go to zenpilot.com call and book a call with one of our experts. We've helped over 3,000 different teams streamline their operations at ClickUp to build more productive, profitable and healthy teams. And we'd love to do the same for you. And with that being said, let's get to the tutorial. So I'm going to click up here and talk about really the process and workflow for managing your ClickUp workspace. And the reason this is so important is because I've seen so many teams make the mistake of setting up their ClickUp workspace. They put all the time, the effort and the money invested in there to getting it all set up for their team. And then after that, they think we're all good to go, it's all built out correctly, I don't need to do anything else. But that is just flat out wrong. You need to spend the time managing it to see if your team's actually going and using the standard that you set in front of them. Are they actually completing their tasks? Are they tracking their time? Are they using the custom fields, Are they communicating and ClickUp, all that stuff needs to happen if you're trying to get the reporting and visibility that you were wanting when you actually first implemented ClickUp. So think about that. Good inputs from your team is going to give you the good outputs that you need. And if we want to make sure that nothing slips through the cracks, we need to make sure all these tasks have assignees and due dates. We need to make sure that the team is tracking their time, things like that. All that needs to happen in order to make that happen. We need to make sure we're managing our workspace and being able to sort of see those issues as they arise and have someone that's there to hold the team accountable so that we can Build those healthy habits to get your team just kind of doing it automatically as well. So this is all just a progression forward. We need to continue to optimize, continue to get better within the organization. So the first step here is going to be actually hiring a ClickUp Champion on your team. We have a great video and article we put together on what makes a great ClickUp Champion. I'll put that in the top right as well as in the description below. But essentially a ClickUp Champion is going to be someone that's going to they're a lover of ClickUp. They are going to be your internal ClickUp expert. So if anyone has any questions they can come to them. They're also someone that's very systems minded, process driven as well. But they can also they're comfortable managing the rest of the team in sort of a fashion of just holding them accountable. They shouldn't be afraid to say hey, you haven't tracked your time they this past week. Can you please do that? Is there anything I can do to help? Is there something you're unaware of or just is there not clarity there? They need to be comfortable doing that with your teams. So that's the first step. The next step is actually building out tasks in here for essentially their daily ClickUp spot check. And this is what I'm gonna be focusing on in today's video. I'll go over what this task actually is as well as the dashboard that they can use to help manage the workspace. And there's a few other things like a weekly roundup and a monthly analysis, but we'll go over those in another video. I'm going to focus our time here on the daily spot check. So essentially where this task is going to live. And again this is going to be a daily task. So you can set this up in a recurring fashion of just building this for every single weekday there. But as you'll see, this is in my operation space inside of a general administrative folder inside a ClickUp management list. And if you've seen our other videos on the ClickUp hierarchy, in terms of the spaces we typically recommend, especially for client service businesses, you'll see we have growth, delivery and operations. That's our common setup. But essentially you just want this to be in an operation. This card or this could be a view, but essentially it allows you to very easily audit and monitor your workspace in one place. So it's a very great way that ClickUp uses those views and the cards inside of dashboards to be able to funnel all that into One location. So essentially what we like to do is here you'll notice on the left I have basically using these calculation widgets. If I show you that here, I'm just kind of saying, hey, give me the high end number of how many issues we actually have. And then on the right side help me actually go and monitor those issues and maybe assign this work to someone or leave a comment on that task or just flag whoever needs to to actually get that work assigned out. So that's kind of what we do. Put those side by side so that we can kind of see again the high end number and actually go and adjust those issues right here. So this one, again, this is just a calculation widget labeled no assignee. You're going to want to go through all these different settings here to adjust maybe the locations on where these tasks are actually falling. Your task count is what I would recommend here. Because again we're just saying what are all the tasks that don't have assignee? Summarize that here for us. We're not going to use the unit none there. That'll be the best option for you. You want to make sure you include subtasks here as well. Especially if you're working out of subtasks. Then you can include tasks and multiple lists. Subtasks and multiple lists here. In addition and in your filters. This may be different for you depending on what you have set up. But as you can see here, the most important one is going to be where assignee is not set. I have a few additional ones here using task types. If you've seen our other videos on task types, this may make a little bit more sense. But essentially not every task in our workspace needs to be assigned if it's not actionable or if it's just a time tracking bucket. So we're using that to say, hey, if a task is labeled one of these, I don't need it to be assigned. So please don't put that inside of this card here. In addition, status is not planning. We kind of use that for backlog inside of our workspace. So that's another thing that says hey, that doesn't need to be assigned quite yet. So please just go ahead and keep that filtered out of these cards right here. So after you're done with that, go ahead and click save. And what that essentially again is going to do is give you that high end number number there for you. And after that you're going to create a task list card here as well. So the task list card is essentially going to follow the same filters for the most part. Again, the most important one is going to be where assignee is not set. And essentially what this allows you to do is kind of come here and I can add multiple columns, essentially, assignee, as you can see, it's not set. I can put on the due date there. I can put the time estimate. And the beauty of this is I can also do created by. So created by shows me who created this task. So who is that person I need to get in touch with to say, hey, you create this task and was not assigned. Why is this the case? In addition, if I wanted to, it's actually over here. I can put in the comment piece of this as well. So I can comment and leave a comment and mention whoever the creator was to say, hey, can you please assign this workout? Or maybe I know who the assignee should be. So I can actually go ahead and assign this directly here. But as you can see, this is how work falls through the cracks. Because there's a due date of April 17th and 14th. These are overdue tasks that weren't assigned. So this is slipping through the cracks. This might be an important task that just didn't get assigned because it wasn't assigned. No one knew who was in charge of it, so we didn't do it. So make sure again, you go through all of these different tasks and make sure they all get assigned to someone. And again, if you do this on a daily basis, you probably won't have 559. But if that's the case, you're going to have a lot of work to do to make sure that work gets assigned. But that's the first piece there. No assignee, no due date is going to follow a relatively same fashion there with the way that this is set up. We have our calculation and task list widget and we're going to have some filters in here where the due date is not set. And again, I don't need the status of planning. That's sort of my backlog. It doesn't need to have a due date on it quite yet. Obviously we want to plan those tasks in the future. But I can filter that out inside of this card. But you'll want to do that again. Zero, no due dates, which is great. So that's going to make it. So nothing shows up over here as well. So that's great. That's what we're aiming for. You want to make sure you get all these down to zero. Again, if you see habits of someone creating a lot of tasks and they're not assigning them or they're the creator and there's no due dates. That is an issue you need to flag. You should message them directly and say, hey, you're not assigned these tasks, you're not putting due dates on there. That's not a habit we want to follow. Please try to fix that. After that, we also have no time estimate, so this is not necessarily as important as these. It's not going to make tasks slip through the cracks. However, if you're trying to manage workload inside of ClickUp, you need to make sure those time estimates are there because that's going to be what populates your workload view inside of your ClickUp workspace. So we need to make sure that these all have time estimates on it to help us manage our workload and make that more and more realistic. So as you can see, this is going to follow a very similar fashion to what we had before, where the time estimate is not set on both the calculation and task list widgets there. And I can come here and either just mention the creator of this task, how long do you think this is going to take, or I can also mention the assignee as well because they might be a little bit easier to actually know how long that'll take. So either do that or you can go ahead and adjust the time estimate yourself if you know what that time estimate is. So again, the goal is to get all of these down to zero and then after that is going to be the overdue tasks here. So on these overdue tasks, essentially these are things that weren't completed there and you might have some that aren't assigned and that's probably the reason it's overdue. We want to make sure and go through leave comments on these or just the due dates for people. So come here. And again, I can add on all the fields I may need for this. I'm also using a client lead custom field here as well that allows me to kind of see who that client lead is. If that's the case, I can mention that person to say, hey, this work is for one of your clients that you are either the team lead or the account manager for. I can mention them or I can also go ahead and add that created by task or field there for me to see that as well. So choose whatever works best for you in terms of who you need to mention. Either adjust these due dates yourself or at mention the person that needs to adjust them and go from there. So again, we're trying to get down to zero to make sure that our workspace is clean and fresh and doesn't have work slipping through the cracks. So that's the first section there. In addition after that is going to be time entries. So we're all able to add a couple widgets here. One of them is going to be time reporting, where I'm just looking at time that was tracked today. So as you can see, no one's actually tracked time quite today, which is probably not a good thing. If you see this, sometimes you may need to go here and just hit refresh. Or you can refresh at the top of your screen as well. It's always important to do that before you go into a dashboard just to make sure that the data that's coming through is accurate and up to date. Because even if you refresh on your full screen, that doesn't always solve the issue. We need to actually refresh the data that's inside of this dashboard. So make sure. Just get in a good habit of refreshing that always. As you'll see, we can kind of see who has been tracking time today as well as this week. And you can come through and sort of see the differences between estimated and tracked. I can also pull this down to see the work that they're actually working on and maybe where those differences are. Because Grace spent a lot of time in this blog strategy. It was estimated for 30 minutes and tracked for over two hours. So maybe there is an issue there. Maybe I need to get in touch with him to say, hey, do we need to adjust the actual task or this process for this task is falling into or did you just spend way too much time on this? So just make sure you fly those issues to kind of see if you need to update those process templates. Or maybe there's something else because we want to have those time estimates as accurate as possible. So again, that builds a cleaner workload view for us. So that's the next thing. Again, these are both just really those time reporting cards that you can use to track that information. After that then is Healthy Habits. And this section is essentially just a task audit for all of our closed tasks. Because even if a task is closed, we want to make sure it has the appropriate fields on there. So as well as there's track time on there, if we're trying to get good visibility reporting. Cause you don't always just track on the. You don't always just get reporting on the open tasks. You most often will also want to look at the closed tasks too. So in that case we need to look at this dashboard card here to kind of see where were their tasks, where maybe they weren't custom fields filled out, or where time wasn't tracked. Because as you can see, Kevin closed this task, but he doesn't have the 10 minutes of that time estimate there. He didn't actually track any time, and that is an issue for us. So you can just filter this out where the date is closed today and you can just look at to see, okay, do we not have track time? Are we missing a custom field here? As you can see, there is track time there. You can join. Just go through this to see all the tasks that were closed and just make sure that they have all the appropriate data that needs to be on all of these tasks. So pretty simple process there. Again, you're just going to leverage a task list on this one as well. Pretty similar to the above cards that I showed you earlier. But just make sure that all the closed tasks have what is necessary to be on them in terms of track time, custom fields and things like that. And after the healthy habits, we then have user activity here too. So this is essentially a way to use a who's behind card inside of ClickUp, which is a great one to leverage because what this does is this shows us who has a bunch of unread notifications and a lot of overdue tasks. So this is kind of an easy way for me to kind of pull it up at a high level to see who is building these healthy habits and ClickUp and who isn't. Because as you can see here, Jeff Cipher has 16 unclear notifications, only two overdue tasks, which isn't bad. But Kevin has 10 unread notifications and 38 overdue tasks, so that's probably an issue there. We need to make sure Kevin doesn't have that many overdue tasks. What's the reason for that? Do we need to reassign some of these? Is he overloaded? We need to make sure we know what those issues are. And again, we want to make sure everyone's getting down to zero every single day for their un. For their unread notifications, because that's what's going to make it so we can actually communicate. And ClickUp, because if someone has 500 unread notifications, there's probably a chance that they're not going to read those and maybe they get to the point where they just clear all of them. We don't want those habits formed. So that's a big one. Again, just do a who's behind widget for that one and as we go down here as well, another great one inside of ClickUp is the workspace points card that you can leverage. And essentially what this does is this just shows me who's added a lot of comments in ClickUp, who's resolved a lot of comments, who's completed a lot of tasks, who's worked on a lot of tasks, and that gives me sort of a point value for the team there as well. So this is just kind of a great way to celebrate the success of the team. This is the one to flag issues up here, but down here I am able to say, hey, who's doing a great job? And ClickUp, let's celebrate that success and we're going to see it inside of this card. So that's one that you want to do there. In addition, you can also leverage a due date updates activity view. Essentially what we're doing here is we're trying to see who has been moving due dates but not leaving a comment on that task because that's going to be an important habit to follow if we have someone pushing due dates every single day and it's just kind of moving it. Hey, I didn't get to it. Didn't get to it. Didn't get to it. Why is that the case? That's not going to be very helpful for our team if we have the sort of habit of just pushing due dates all of the time. We want to make sure it's going to be an important habit to follow if we have someone pushing due dates every single day and it's just kind of moving it. Hey, I didn't get to it. Didn't get to it, didn't get to it. Why is that the case? That's not going to be very helpful for our team if we have the sort of habit of just pushing due dates all of the time. We want to make sure that the due date is the due date, the do date. That's when we're supposed to do it. And yes, there are going to be times where we fall a little bit behind and we can't do that task, but we need to make sure that we're following the due dates as the best as we can. So we need to make sure that we're building the habit of if this is falling overdue, we actually go and label that task and say, hey, at mention whoever needs to know and make sure that the team is aware that that task is moved. And so what you're going to do to build that is you can create an Activity view and just bring in all the due date activities and that's just going to show you all the tasks where the due dates were moved and make it easy for your ClickUp Champion to manage that process. So that's another one that you're going to want. This one does take a little bit longer to load usually, so you might have to be patient with those activity views, especially if someone's moved a ton of tasks inside of ClickUp and after that, this one may not be as relevant to you. This is sort of a process that we follow, but we use the planning status here to basically label all tasks that that are in our backlog, essentially. So they're all going to have this planning status applied to it. So we typically have planning and then to do and then sort of all those active statuses after that. But planning again is sort of in our backlog, but we want to make sure if it is in our backlog, we're coming here and actually planning these tasks out. So your ClickUp Champion is also going to monitor this card here to say, hey, now, this has been in the planning status for three or four months. We need to make sure we actually get this planned if we're going to do it. So they'll monitor this view here as well. So again, that's going to follow similar fashion to everything up here in terms of those task lists as well as the calculation widgets on the left hand side. So now after your ClickUp Champion has gone through this dashboard and they feel good about it, they've audited the workspace, they've let anyone know, hey, we need to fix this issue. And they've adjusted those assignees, due dates, things like that, to make sure nothing slips to the cracks. They can come back to their task, make sure obviously that they are tracking their time on this task, but they're able to go and come here and what I would recommend is they leave all of their notes here in the comments section. So if there's anything they noticed or maybe any issues that arise from this, put those all here inside of comments. Because at the end of the week, once you have sort of those five daily ClickUp spot checks, you're going to want to put together a weekly report on what you've noticed and start creating tasks for things that we need to improve upon. Do we need to hold another training for the team? Do we need to make sure that our time estimates have been adjusted in some of those tasks within our process templates? Make sure all of those issues and all the notes are put in this comment section because that's going to Every time this task is recreated from those recurring settings, you'll have all those comments in there to help you put together that weekly report. But again, make sure this task's in there for your ClickUp champion. Get a good description on what it actually is. Build a checklist for them. Build build that dashboard to make sure that they can manage your workspace so that you can get better inputs, which is going to give you better outputs to make sure that your ClickUp implementation and all the time, money and energy you put into actually setting it up is all worth it and you get the good reporting and visibility that you wanted when you actually went ahead and chose to implement ClickUp for your team. And that's how you manage your ClickUp workspace on a daily basis to help hold your team accountable and build the healthy habits that you need to have a successful project management implementation. And please, if you like this video and you found it useful, go ahead and hit the like button and subscribe. We're going to continue to deliver weekly content for teams trying to get the most out of ClickUp. And also, if you have any questions, comments or just feedback in general, leave those in the comments section below and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. And remember, if you want ClickUp's first ever and highest rated solutions partner to help you stream on your operations in ClickUp and just hit the Error Easy button here, go to zenpilot.com call and book a call with one of our experts. We are here to help. And with that, that's all I have for today. Thank you so much for watching this video. I'll see you again next time. It's about time.