Matt Ragland shows how to use ClickUp's Whiteboard to convert brainstorming notes into actionable tasks. He walks through turning mind map nodes into actual work items, using YouTube content planning as an example.
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I love a good brainstorm or mind mapping session, but the toughest thing about brainstorming is turning those ideas into concrete action items. You're shifting from maker energy into manager energy, and this is a really important shift because at this point, this is when I'm deciding what needs to be prioritized and when. Not to mention, it's just plain tedious to get your ideas from a whiteboard or mind mapping tool into your productivity app of choice. I love analog tools. I find them really helpful to get started with because just, you know, paper and pen, let's go. And I will often do initial mind mapping inside of this bullet journal that I like to use. But again, it's tedious to get those from the paper onto the app and turn them into actual items. That's why I really love this new whiteboard feature from ClickUp, because I can turn an idea into an actual item with just a click. Okay, so here we are in ClickUp. This is what I've been using for all of my whiteboarding recently, and it's really simple to get started with. All you do is come over here to the space that you have set up and click New Whiteboard. And what I've done here is a really simple kind of mind map setup. And so I have YouTube content right here as the core idea, and then all of these different branches of these 8 main categories of YouTube videos. Start with that root idea, that root concept, a really clear outcome of what you want to do, and then start to branch out and branches upon branches of different ideas, of different ways that you think you can come to success. Because one of the things that I believe is very underrated is the development of a ton of ideas, because it's only through the development of a lot of ideas can you arrive at really good and even great world-changing ideas. I was recently talking with YouTube coach and consultant Paddy Galloway, and one of the things that Paddy really hammered home for me is like, how much time are you spending developing ideas? How many ideas are you coming up with before you land on the one that's actually going to be a YouTube video? And I said, uh, you know, not a whole lot of time generating ideas in this specific way. He said you have to generate an exponential number more ideas than what you will actually come up with for success. I want to have 6 to 8 ideas for each of these 6 to 8 categories. If I'm able to do that, then I can pretty effectively plan a whole year of YouTube content just in this whiteboard. The purpose is to get a lot of ideas on the table, on the board, on the page. So that you and whoever else you're working with can start to decide these are the videos, these are the types of experiments, these are the different tasks that are really going to help move everything forward for us, that are going to help me make a successful, engaging YouTube video. So my goal here, 8 categories, 6 to 8 to 10 ideas per category. I'm just adding them on as additional branches or nodes in mind mapping terms. I just don't like the word node. But I'm adding in all these ideas that could become videos in the future or might become the next video that I'm going to create. So far, everything that I've done is very standard, traditional whiteboard, mind map, brainstorming style. I'm getting the idea out of my head and onto the screen, onto the whiteboard, onto the piece of paper. But this is where the magic happens in ClickUp. The thing that I love about this that is very unique to ClickUp at this moment is that I can take any of these ideas and I can turn them immediately into tasks. So you can see that I've already done this for a couple of videos that I'm already working on. But let's be very meta right here. And you can see that I have the idea, the video idea in the tool category of how to turn ideas into action. And I'm using this whiteboard. I'm going to show you how I'm using it. But right here, all I have to do is click on this shape and you see this convert item right here. Just click on this and I can, I can turn it into some other things including a sticky note, but I'm going to turn it into a task. And I'm going to put it into the YouTube video list. So let's go ahead and convert to task. And if I come over here to YouTube, I scroll down, turning ideas into action. Now it's here as an idea. So I find it really useful for turning this idea that I had into action and then developing that idea into a published video. I've taken this idea that I had for a video, turned it into an action item, starting to work on that video all inside of ClickUp, all with just a couple of clicks. Now, as I'm going through the whiteboard that I've created, we can follow this process for every single idea. Now, not every idea is going to become a video, remember, because we may have to generate 100 ideas to get 10 really good videos. But in this process, any time that I want to convert an idea into a video, I just have to make a couple of clicks and all of a sudden it's an action item. It's on the board and it's ready to start being worked on. This may seem so simple that it's easy to miss, but at the time of this recording, ClickUp is the only software that will allow you to take your whiteboard ideas and convert them automatically into tasks with just a click. Everything else, you either have to do it manually or you have to have some kind of like multi-step integration or use Zapier or something like that. Again, you saw how easy it was. All I have to do is select the shape, select the idea, turn it into an action item, and I can start working from there. If you want to see more use cases for how you can develop whiteboards into projects and into action items, sign up to my email list. I'm going to be asking my subscribers in the next couple of weeks for different ideas and different use cases, and then I'll be sharing those as subscriber-only videos. You can sign up for my email newsletter and get my weekly emails by signing up in the description below. Thanks for watching this video, and thank you to ClickUp for supporting my channel this month. If you want to sign up to ClickUp and try out Whiteboards for yourself, it's totally free to get an account. Just sign up. Also, link in the description below. Thanks so much for watching this video, and I'll see you next time. Bye.
