George B. Thomas shows how to trigger ClickUp automations before a task's actual due date. Create a custom Publish date field for the real deadline, set the task's initial due date seven days earlier, then use a due date automation to run your workflow and update to the actual date. It's a workaround for ClickUp's trigger limitations.
In this video, I'm going to talk about how to build a workaround with ClickUp Automations to make sure that a task is triggering an automation weeks prior to the actual due date. And it's going to make more sense if I just show you. So let's dive into ClickUp. So here we are, and we have a task with a due date and we want to have an automation trigger, say one week before this due date. You'd think that we'd be able to go into ClickUp Automations, click Add Automations and say when due date almost arrives. But unfortunately there's not that option. There's just due date changes, which means we've changed the date or the due date arrives, meaning that due date is today. There's no trigger for the due date is seven days away. So what we need to actually do in ClickUp, which sounds a little crazy, is we actually need to change our initial due date to be seven days prior. Okay, so to make this happen, I'm going to go into ClickUp, I'm going to create another date custom field and let's call this publish date Publish date too, because I was already playing with this publish date and I'm going to make the publish date April 4th, or April 24th, rather. I cannot count my months. April 24th. There we go. And I'm going to make my due date seven days prior. And this is the setup that we need in order to have this automation work. So then what we can do is automation to say add automation. When due date arrives, we're basically working with what we got here. When due date arrives, we want to set due date to be fields from trigger date and choose publish date to I created it twice. Excuse the duplicate there. Basically what this is saying is when the due date arrives, our initial due date, we can have whatever automation we want to have occur and then also have that date change to the true final due date. So whatever we want to have our automation do, let's just create this one. I already created it once. We're going to delete that. We're also going to have maybe when due date arrives, we're also going to have a comment. So in this way, when the initial due date arrives, our comment is going to be added and then at the same time that due date is going to change to be our final publish date. This is frustrating. It's not the best kind of situation. I'd much rather see ClickUp just change their structure. So that way we could say when custom field arrives or four days before due date arrives. We don't have that option right now. So this is as close as we we're going to get to have this be an automatic process. What I would suggest is making sure that when you set this up in your initial template, you just make sure to make that due date seven days before. We used to be able to create an automation in here that would say when due date changes, set the custom field to be seven days later. Does not seem to let us do that right now. So if I want to go in here Publish date 2 Choose date like there's not an option anymore. We used to be able to have this set automatically that is no longer available. So I would just make sure that you're only always keeping track of this being seven days in advance. So that way when that date does arrive, the automation does its magic. So that way this date becomes the same exact date as your publish date and you don't have to worry about it anymore. This publish date, once you initially set it up, you might choose to have visible and then hide your actual due date from the task in order to make this come to life. Obviously, I know this isn't the perfect solution, but it is a solution to this problem. So if you are trying to have something some automation be triggered by based on the arrival of a due date, this would be the workaround I suggest if you would like to do it natively within ClickUp without having to work out of other outside tools. And I just want to say this video in this tutorial was based on a request from a clicking up member. If you guys don't know, I run Clickingup Community, which I'm pretty sure is the most comprehensive ClickUp community out there. We have live Q and A every week, monthly masterminds, all that good stuff. And this was just one question that came up in a Q and A a few weeks back and I wanted to highlight it here on the channel because I've had the question come up publicly quite a few times. But if you'd like to see the other several hundred Q&As that we've done privately in private live streams for the members, you might want to check out Clickingup Community. The link is in the description below to all of that good stuff. So thank you guys so much for joining me for another rather quick video. I hope this was a helpful one for you. If you enjoyed it, please do click like have questions, leave a comment below and I will see you guys back here with another video. Until next time. Enjoy the process. Sam.
