Layla, a ClickUp consultant, explains why custom fields work better than statuses for managing workflows. She covers how to simplify task statuses, handle subtasks, and use automations to speed up content production.
You've probably heard myself or other qlikup consultants talk about how many of us have moved from creating our workflows as statuses in ClickUp and instead created custom fields to manage those statuses. And you might be wondering, why the heck are all these people who supposedly know a lot about ClickUp not using statuses to actually show the status of things? Why is that the case? Before we get started, let me just say my name is Layla. I'm a vetted ClickUp consultant and also the host of ClickingUp. It's an online community that I run. So as we're going through this, if you have any questions or you're feeling a little bit stuck on your ClickUp and you'd like to work together to get it to that level that you're looking to get it to, feel free to use that description below and join us in ClickUp Statuses apply to all tasks and subtasks in a specific area, and they roll all the way up to everything. So whatever statuses you have all over your workspace, if you click on everything, they all kind of show in one long line and help you summarize all of the tasks in your workspace, showing all of the different statuses you have. So for the Everything view alone, it can make sense to have fewer statuses. So everything view is actually usable and not just a hodgepodge of different statuses. But let's just focus on one list. Now let's imagine we had a list, and we wanted to have our statuses represent our workflow. So for example, we're talking a lot about content production this month. Maybe I'm talking about how I develop my YouTube content, and so I create my statuses to be things like idea, draft, edited, published, promoted, something like that. And that's what I have as my statuses, because I'm talking about content, that seems like it would make sense, right? But here's the big conflict. If you're using subtasks in that same list, and often when we're doing that, our subtasks equate to not additional deliverables or additional videos. No, the subtasks are typically referring to the steps of the process. And if that's the case, does it really make sense for our subtask called Upload Video to have all of those different statuses? Not really. And while custom fields can be collapsed and kind of taken out of view, statuses are always right there in a task. So if I get to the subtask of Upload Video and I'm seeing all of those different statuses, what am I supposed to move it to? Right? It's confusing. And so generally speaking, what we stick to is creating our statuses as something simple like to do in progress done, or to do complete. Personally, one of the biggest changes I've been doing over my ClickUp for the past 12 months is increasingly simplifying my statuses to where most of my areas right now are to do complete. Because that check mark is just so much more practical than having a long series of statuses. We complement this by creating a custom field where applicable. So the custom field might say we video process. And the video process has a stage called not applicable. And then it has the full process below that. So for the subtasks, we would keep that as not applicable or just blank. And for the main task, we would actually use that custom field to follow the video through all of the phases of the process. But for the subtasks we can kind of just ignore it and know that just that check mark is going to mark it complete. And it's just so much simpler for everyone. The other reason is what happens when you produce a podcast or you have an email newsletter or you have some social media. You have other processes that you need to track. If we were using a status and we had to keep track of all those different variations, well, when we go back to Everything view, or when we're trying to sort all of our statuses, we're going to see so many different variations of ready to publish, promoting, promoting, and then ready to publish. And they're all slightly different processes. And because everything views kind of like a Russian doll, where we want all of our statuses to fit into one logical flow, having all those different processes as statuses, it's going to make our lives so much harder. But versus if we had very simple statuses again, and in that custom field we had video process and we had steps one through five. Then we had podcast process steps one through four. We could have those custom fields visible on just the applicable areas and not worry about muddying up our Everything view. Quick Tips if you do decide to take this advice and put your process in a custom field. 1. Make sure your SOP, your process, your checklist, whatever you're using to help guide the way work is done, calls out when you should switch it to the next stage, right? When do we go from editing to publishing? What is the moment and who is in charge of doing that? Make sure that's really spelled out, whether it's in your checklist item, your ClickUp doc or as part of your subtask description 2 I really like to use fractions in front of these stages to help you keep an eye on what's the overall progress. So if you have, you know, edited upload, promoted that kind of thing, have it be one out of three, edited two out of three, uploaded three out of three, promoted that kind of thing to help you keep track of where you're at on the overall process. Finally, if your workflow has things that happen before it's published and after it's published, keep in mind that you can use automations to trigger that change. So for example, if the blog post is coming out on November 1st, have your overall task due date be that publication date and then set up an automation that says when the due date arrives, change the custom field to go from scheduled to publish. This is probably one of the most useful automations for a content management system in ClickUp, and I think it's an automation that even the newest of ClickUp users can take advantage of. As always, if you find yourself getting frustrated with going down the YouTube rabbit hole of trying to figure out ClickUp, consider joining ClickingUp. It's my community where we actually teach you how to use ClickUp, but also how to document your processes so so you can truly have that business instruction manual actually within your ClickUp account. So if you want more information about that, go to the description below and just always want to give this disclaimer. If you are financially not in a place due to the, you know, worldwide pandemic or anything else that you are not able to pay for services at this time, I completely understand you liking subscribing, commenting, supporting this video and this channel and this free content is also so appreciated. If you're in a position where that's something that you're looking to do, keep me mind. If not, just keep supporting this channel. I appreciate you being part of this community and until next time, enjoy the process.
