Use Cases for ClickUp Automation (Beta) | April 2020 Example Business Cases

My friends, it is finally here. After years of wishing and months of hoping and days of clicking refresh, the ClickUp Automation feature is now released. What this means is that we can now automate tasks within the ClickUp ecosystem using Automations. They can be set up to be running behind the scenes as we do things that we normally would do and trigger actions that we don't have to worry about but know get done well, hopefully perfectly. It's a new feature. There might be some bugs, but nonetheless, Automations is here. I've been looking forward to this feature for years and I'm sure many of you have as well. In the last few days they've been hyping this, they've been telling us it's been coming. And now that it's here, I went in and I started looking at all the possibilities and let me, let me open it up here so you can follow along with me looking at all the possibilities of what we can be doing with it. And honestly, even after being so excited for it, I was a little overwhelmed in how to start using this in a business context. Because of course, just like many other tools, they're grouping things by function functionality, but not giving you the examples of how you can actually start using that in your business or in your team. So in this video, I'm going to give you the jump start I wish I had last night when I started playing with these and talk about how stories or examples or situations in your business could actually use these automation features. I'm going to give 10 examples here. I will try to be brief. It will likely not be brief, but nonetheless, my hope is that this, this video series will help you kind of grease the gears and start thinking about how you can start applying Automations. I think once we start thinking in the right mindset, it becomes very clear as to how we can use automations in our business. But hopefully, like I said before, this will be the jumpstart to get you thinking in that way. Before we dive in though, let me introduce this talking head. My name is Layla and I am a process consultant. I specialize in working with small teams to improve their efficiency by documenting processes and. Yep, you guessed it, using technology. So ClickUp for me started as a personal obsession, things I was using in my own business and life and then transformed into something I use with my clients and help others set up. So as we're going through here, if you're hearing things that make you think, huh, I need to talk more about this or I wish someone would help me talk through this with my business, feel free to reach out. That's kind of what I do. But if you're just here for the free content, can't blame you. Let's dive in. So example number one, story number one of how you could use ClickUp is. Oh, I'm actually going to give you a few examples in one story here. Let's imagine you have a business where you have different statuses for different stages in a process. Maybe it's social media creation. Many of us have social media presences, right? So this should be a relatable one. Stage one is drafting. It's where the content and the structure and the facts are created. This might be with your subject matter experts or the owner or the marketing lead to generate that framework. The next status is editing. So it's been drafted, needs to be edited, maybe add some designs. The next status is to schedule it, add the hashtags, put it on the scheduler, get it out into social media. Simple three stages before it is scheduled, which is your complete or closed status. Let's start thinking about how we could use automations in this framework. So the number one, this would be example number one thing we could do is change the assignees at different stages. So the statuses I just gave you, each of those statuses probably has a different owner. So the virtual assistant is probably in charge of all the scheduling. The marketing lead is probably in charge of all of the content structure. The editor is probably in charge of all of the editing where the designer is. Either way you've got different people in charge of different statuses. The way to solve that without automations would be to have maybe multiple assignees. All three of those people, all three of those people involved are gonna be added as assignees at every stage of the way. That gets confusing because, well, how do they know when they need to actually do something? The other alternative would be to have people manually change who's assigned. They mean to flip you off there, but have people change who is assigned at each status, which you know due to human error might not happen. Automations here can be helpful where we can say when the status changes to this status, change the assignee to this person. You can either add that assignee or replace the existing assignee with that person. But you could have it so that way each stage you've got a different assignee going. So that is example number one of how you can use these automations in your business. If you're using different statuses, have it change the assignee for you. Example number two of how in the same story we can use automations is say each status has a different template, meaning there are different things that need to be done at different tasks. You might want to use this feature. Again, we're triggering based on statuses, but when our status goes from drafting to editing we we have different things we need to accomplish. Maybe your SOP for editing is someone needs to do check Grammarly, they need to check spelling, they need to check links, etc. When the status changes to the editing status, add the template for editing. It's that easy. Rather than having your editor remember every time to load that template once it's in that stage or overwhelming your editor by having all of the tasks available and viewed from step one in your process, you know all of the all of the different steps are on that task from the very first stage. This will allow you to have the relevant tasks show up at the relevant status. So this is example number two of how to use ClickUp Automations in the business context. We're just flying through here, aren't we? The next one I want to talk about is this the automatic progression from one status to the next. I'm going to stick with the content example here, but you can imagine how this could be useful in so many different avenues of your business. In the example I gave you, we move to a different status based on what has been complete. When everything is complete, we move to the next status and apply a new template. So we might want to consider Again, I'm using the default ones here, but you can create all these from scratch as well. Oops, didn't mean to click on that when we are in here. Screen is small. Okay, we could use something like when all checklists are resolved meaning complete, done change status. Or we could also do the same thing for subtasks. So say we have an ex. We have a loaded template for how we do content drafting. It involves creating a title, drafting the content and having an outline, probably not in that order. So we do those things when those three steps. When the first person, the subject matter expert, the first person in the relay race completes those three steps, ClickUp will automatically move it to the next task or the next status rather. Which is nice because I don't know about you, but I have issues with my team sometimes completing things but being unsure if they should move it to the next task or leave it there. Keep saying task, move it to the next status or if they should leave it where it is. So what you can have is ClickUp automatically progress things through to the next Stage triggering a series of additional actions. This starts automating the handoff process between different individuals. Pretty cool, huh? I think so. So that is example number three. That is our third automation example of having it change statuses based on the completion of either subtasks or checklists. Depending on how you organize your information, this could also be useful. Here is this checklist. One is if you have subtasks and and those subtasks have checklists, making sure that those subtasks are marked complete whenever the checklist is complete. Again, simple example I'm going to count that as number four folks, is if you have a subtask called make draft and you have a five part checklist, whenever that checklist is done, have the task be automatically completed. So there's not those two stages of repetition for your team. Okay. The other one we're going to talk about is back up here when we're going to keep using this example. When we're at the final status, let's say we're doing content creation. The last status is scheduled. And rather than having everything be scheduled all in this one column, maybe we want all of our scheduled content to all aggregate into one list. So maybe we have a list called social media, list called Events, a list called newsletters. We also have a list called scheduled things or something. So all of our lists are for production. And when things are scheduled, we want to put them all in one list. So we can look at things on a content calendar view using scheduled dates or a month custom field. We could have that happen by having it every time a task is complete, we change the list to move that task somewhere else. Another example of how to do this, and I'll switch examples here is imagine you have E Commerce. You have multiple lists and the statuses in one list lead to the next list. So incoming order might have new order, order processed, order accepted, and then it moves to the next list which is production order or production. Production started, production in progress, production complete, and then it moves to the next list which is invoicing. And you get the point by using this change, when status changes, move to list feature. We can start connecting lists of statuses to create a full process. So we're not just focused on one piece. We can actually connect the statuses to start the next series of statuses in the next list. This can be very helpful if you have different teams who are working on different lists that you have segmented their visibility to, or just they're not. Maybe your production team is only looking at the production list and so you want to make sure things are passed in and out of their world seamlessly without you or a manager needing to move things manually. So that is example number five of an automation you can use. Is that move to a different list based on status or based on something else? I think status is probably the most likely here. Now let's again take the small team example and imagine you have a really, a really vigilant team, a great team, but sometimes they run it a little bit close on deadlines. A nice automation to set up would be something like this. When the due date arrives, change priority. And we're actually going to customize this a little bit more. When the due date is today, I want this thing to be urgent. I want everybody to all hands on deck. When a client task, or maybe any task. When a task is due today, I want it to be urgent. I want it to be top of everyone's mind and say that task is in client space. So let's look for, oh, it won't let me do it in a client space yet. Let's just say it's tagged and it's tagged as client. I want to also make sure that it, the CEO is added as an assignee. So here we're kind of using two in one. When the due date is today, make this urgent so the whole team sees it's urgent and add the CEO or add some support in as additional assignees to help kind of group together and get in to finish that task to get things done when things are due today. That is a good way to make sure that while you can be very hands off with your team some of the time, you are able to dive in at the last second in case things are going wrong, in case you're about to miss a deadline. So that way there's huge amount of visibility on what needs to get done in a given day. Okay, so that is number. What are we up to? We've gotten about six examples here. Let's do a little bit more. Let's keep telling some stories. One of my favorite examples, which is actually right here, one of my favorite automations which can be used in any story. So it's kind of hard to tell just one. I'm going to use my own example here. I have a list in MySpace called MySpace ha. To remember when I have a list within a folder in my ClickUp that is called YouTube production. And every time I create a task in there it is a video. Each task represents a video which has a set process. So this feature right here when task is created, then apply. A template is extremely useful for me. So I can go in here. When a task is created, I can choose the location. Well, actually it's within the task. It's within this location right now. I want to always apply my. I think I have one in here. Yeah, YouTube. I want to always apply my production process to a task created in that list. So what this does is it basically ensures anytime we have a to do in that topic, my SOP is automatically loaded. This could also work if you have a productized service. Say you have a service called a method map. Oh wait, that's me. And you have a list for method map and a task per client. When a new client is created, which might be done automatically through an integration or might be done manually as you just create it. When you know that client is going to say yes and you move that client task through the process, have the template automatically load when that task is created. And that would load things like your onboarding process, your service delivery, your offboarding process, all of the steps automatically loaded as soon as the task is created. And that's all here. Just using this feature that I just described to you here. If you can't come up with any examples for how you can use this, you probably don't have enough processes in your business. And this might be your call to action to start getting on that because it is very helpful. All right, another one here. It's actually right next to it when a status changes archive task. So let's imagine you have a very simple personal to do list. Maybe you're a solopreneur or you're using ClickUp for personal use. And you don't really need to keep a running list of all the things you've completed. It's just unnecessary. And you have just maybe a list called to dos. And when something is from to do to done, you just want to archive it. You don't need a record of all the things that are done. This can be a very nice little feature for you. When status is moved to closed archive task, it just eliminates it, removes it, makes sure it's out of your sight, out of your mind, and it keeps things a little bit cleaner. That seems like a little bit of a softball, but nonetheless it is an automation that you can definitely use to kind of clean. Clean up the space. Clean up the space in your business. Now we can add more conditions to this. So maybe we want to. Maybe we can say due date is. It's always hard to do an equal to. But you can have different dates for kind of ways to reduce this so that you're not eliminating everything in the closed section. But again, you can customize all of these. Every single time I add a condition, this is an and statement. So this is like when it is in closed and the due date is equal to blank, yada yada yada. So something might. Each time we add a condition, we are narrowing the. Narrowing the actions down by narrowing it down to focus on specific, more specific situations. All right, that was a roundabout way of saying that. So the other example I'm going to give you here is what if you are using tags to organize your business? Maybe two examples of how you can automate the tag process. So again, this depends on how your business operates. But let's just say you have a you're invoicing in ClickUp based on hours worked and you're only invoicing when it reaches a certain status. Perhaps. So why not have a trigger happen when a status changes? Maybe there's a status called ready to invoice. And when you are in that status, because that status isn't uniform form across the entire organization, maybe you want to add a tag to that status saying ready to invoice. So anytime something's ready to invoice, that tag is added. And when it's in the ready to invoice status, the tag is added automatically. So when the status changes from whatever to let's just say it's. Let's just imagine in progress means it's ready to go. Actually, no better example, when things are closed, they are ready to invoice. So you can add the tag ready to invoice. There we go. That helps you add those tags automatically based on moments where you would typically add the tag manually. If you are using ClickUp for invoicing and just kind of using their native time tracker, it is very easy to miss invoicing something because you are not keeping proper tabs on where the time is tracked. It's just kind of a difficult process. Which is why the integrated time trackers can be very helpful. However, this could help you make sure that nothing is getting missed by automatically tagging things that have certain attributes. So maybe it's that they're enclosed, maybe it's that they've reached a certain status. Maybe I don't even. Let's see. Let's see if we can do time tracked time estimate. Okay. Because it would be very fun if you could do once time tracked reaches 10 hours, for example. Unfortunately that's not the case. But let's just say once the due date is reached, then maybe then we want to have due date changes. Do we have that in here? Due date arrives. So when the due date arrives, we want to add a tag saying invoice whatever that trigger is for you, your organization. If you're using tags for invoicing, this could be a good use case for the, for the automation module. And I'm just going to give one more while we're here. While we're talking about tags, is a grab bag example. So when we have task, whether that's automatically or manually, let's say we have a form on ClickUp that automatically creates a task in a list. Maybe the form is initial intake form or support form. When someone submits it, it creates a task in this kind of. We'll call it the support list. You have five different support agents and all of them are keeping an eye on the support list at all times. But they miss things, right? They sometimes don't. Sometimes they're not clear on what they should be working on, what someone else should be working on. So maybe what you want to do is when a task is created, you want to apply a tag that says grab bag, basically meaning this is up for grabs. Anyone can take this task, just grab it, assign it to yourself, start working on it, and you can have that be an automation. This is good. If you sometimes want to assign things to certain representatives or, and in this instance you don't want to, you don't care, anyone can grab it. Assigning that tag to clarify that can be very good because at this point there's no way to make an assignee like in the assignee field to say anyone can grab this, right? So the tag can be a very useful tool there. So I have talked through a variety of ways during this video of how you can use automations in your business. This is by no means an exhaustive list. I've really focused on status, priorities, dates, creation. I mean, we've done a little bit of everything here. But the hope was to start getting your gears turning, get your mind thinking in terms of how you can use these in your business. The actual use cases, the actual scenarios are going to depend on how you and your team use ClickUp, obviously. So if you didn't have, if this wasn't helpful to you in terms of thinking through your process and how to start automating it, feel free to leave a comment below. Myself or someone else in the community will jump in and kind of help you work through how you can use automations for the situation you describe. So again, describe your situation below. We'll jump in and help you figure out how you can set up Automations to do this. Every single one of the examples I talked about here are default templates that are available in Automations, which are available right here near the list title. Just a little funky there, but but you can also create it from scratch using the Custom Automations tool. This is in beta form. As I said before, it's just been released about 24 hours ago. I expect a lot of changes to happen and so if things when you're watching this video look a little different, feel a little different, that is probably because they are a little different. And because ClickUp changes so fast, you'll probably want to subscribe. Get involved and keep an eye out for new videos as this tool evolves and as our instructions and kind of best practices around using it evolve with more use. So thank you so much for watching. Of course, if you like this, subscribe. If you have questions, leave a comment. And thanks for watching. Enjoy your Automations.