ClickUp Tutorial For Beginners

Today we have a ClickUp tutorial for beginners to help you get started with the right foot and make the most out of this amazing online management tool to make your business run smoothly.

P.S.: Click the hyperlinked text to go exactly to the part of the video where we mention each feature!

ClickUp allows users to modify their notifications according to their specific needs in its different platforms (browser, desktop app, and phone app). This way you can choose exactly what kind of notifications are useful for you or which ones you can get rid of for now.

The home screen is where the magic happens. Every day, when you log into ClickUp, the home screen will show you what you have due for that day, any reminders, mentions, things like that. On the home screen, you will find your lineup which is an efficient way to see the most important tasks that you’ve set up for the day. You can even integrate your personal calendar if you want to but it might be overwhelming if you have too many tasks.

Another really cool feature ClickUp has is Spaces. Spaces make it easier to work on different projects within the app, and you can customize each according to your projects’ size or needs. This feature is especially useful if you are working with multiple clients where you need to add multiple folders and lists.

If you are migrating from a different software like Trello, you can customize your ClickUp account to make it similar to what you are used to, but with the extra benefits that ClickUp has to offer and other management tools don’t. When migrating from another tool, we suggest starting with your internal processes that happen often, because if you start with a big process that you don’t have a clear SOP for, it can become a challenge if it’s your first time with ClickUp.

Then, another feature that you can use right from the first day in ClickUp is notes; so for example, if you are in a meeting and you need to take notes, you can do it right inside the app. And the best thing about this feature is that you can turn them into tasks if there are actions that need to be taken.

Finally, we have some specific tips on how to get started in ClickUp that worked for us in the past and will also work for you; such as how to breakdown your spaces and hierarchy, how to organize your ClickUp processes, and some small steps you can take to make the transition into ClickUp go smoothly.

Watch Amalie Show You How To Get Started in ClickUp:

Read The ClickUp Tutorial For Beginners Video Transcript

Amalie Shaffer
I am live. Let’s see, this is the first time I’m going live. So I just want to make sure that it’s working. Let’s see. Sure. Okay. Let’s see.

All right. Okay, perfect. Looks like I’m live. So what I’m going to do today is I’m going to go through exactly the steps that I would take, if I was just starting out with ClickUp. And this will apply to whether I have a moving from another project management tool, or I’m just starting out with one in general. Okay, I’m gonna start there.

I have my screen open to ClickUp. And I’m just going to go through here. So what I would do to get started is I would start with filling out my profile. So I would go to Settings. And I would probably start with notifications. Because if you get inundated with notifications, it can be kind of irritating.

I might go through and set the notifications. Understanding whether you want how you work will be helpful. So if you aren’t going to spend a lot of time in the app, maybe on your phone or in the web app, maybe you want to get them by email. I don’t prefer to get them by email and I also don’t want browser notifications, so I immediately turn those things off. Obviously, that’s my choice. But it’s up to you. But I do want to get my notifications in the Notification Center. So you can see that that’s what I have set. So that’s probably where I’d start.

And then I’d probably just go ahead and if I have team members, you can add them. You know, if you have people that you want to add, you can do that first. But what I would do is I’m going to go in and we’ll just go over a few things.

So the home screen, I really enjoy the home screen. That is generally where I start my day, when I go in to look to see what I have going on. If you want to integrate your calendar, I recommend having your calendar times that are on there, integrated with this calendar in ClickUp but not necessarily synced so that the tasks show up on your calendar. I did that at first and it was a little overwhelming when I was trying to look at my calendar because all the tasks were there. So it depends on what you prefer. But for me, it works better to have the calendar integrated so I can see what I have going on for the day but not necessarily the tasks in my like my Google calendar to show.

And then from here, you know, if I’m mentioned in a comment, I’ll be able to see comments here, things that are done. And then anything I’ve delegated if I do that, and then I can add things to my lineup if I want to get a notification.

So this is just a test but let’s say I wanted to not forget this for today, it’s a priority, I would add it to the lineup and then I would click on my name. And then what it does is it adds it up here to my lineup, and I really like you know, I’d like to have that. So then I can also select other tasks that I want in my lineup.

So from there, notifications, obviously I would check my notifications. And then let’s just dive in here. So in the spaces how I decide the spaces would be the functions of your business. So, if I’m looking at clients, if I have clients, if I have a business that is a service provider business, and I have clients that I need to manage, I want a space for them, I probably want a space for operations for marketing. And then if there needs to be more spaces, then you can add those, but I would start there. If you have the free account, you can do three spaces, you can have more spaces if you have the business or the unlimited subscription.

So from there, I might look at how do I manage clients? If you decide that clients need their own space, because you have multiple folders in there, or then obviously, the setup you would need to do slightly differently, and you would maybe have a space for each client. For us personally, we use folders per client, and then we have lists inside of the folders. So I would think about how I need to manage those clients.

And generally how I decide whether it’s a space, a folder, or just a list, I figure out, are there multiple people working on it? Are there multiple steps to the process or the project? And if there’s more people and more steps to it, or the different phases of it, then I’m going to give them separate lists. If they can all be contained within one folder, then I’ll give them a folder. And that’s how I kind of break it down.

So what I would start with if I’m moving to a new system, or starting out, I would think about what do I have going on right now? And I’d probably start with internal things. So I would start with internal operations, things that are recurring, that you have clear processes for. So that might be down in operations, right, or, you know, for meetings that you have.

And when you’re doing a migration or getting something set up, it’s gonna happen. Of course, you can do it in one day, sit down and get everything set up and that would be great. That doesn’t always happen like that, you’re going to probably end up doing it in phases. So I would probably start with the internal things, internal operations, marketing for internal projects with you and your team.

And then move the clients over, especially if you’re going to have clients see what’s going on in ClickUp, maybe you give them a list that they can see, you’ll want to move that after you’ve moved other things over. That way, you’re not asking the client to be on two different platforms.

I would probably start with the recurring things, things that you have going on on a regular basis. So that might look like whatever your daily tasks are. The way that I would break it down is I would look, I would think about what you have going on, on a daily basis, like start daily, then weekly, monthly, those kinds of things. I would start just putting those in and understand that as you start to build this, this is a living, breathing thing. And it’s going to change. I mean, we’ve changed multiple times, as we’ve used ClickUp more and refined our processes.

What I do recommend is, if you don’t already have a very clear standard operating procedure for something, have that first written out on a Google doc and then come into ClickUp and set it up that way.

And so if we started with operations, that might look like I had mentioned meetings that you have. So if you have an area for meetings, like I’ve shown here, getting those set up, and you’ll have to excuse because I haven’t come in to clean out the meetings or the recurring tasks that I set up. But I would probably get those put in first, establish how you’re going to take notes for the meeting.

So in a previous video on note taking I showed how you can create a doc inside of a task and take notes that way. The great thing about that is you can actually create tasks from your note, so if you are on a meeting and there’s a task that comes out of it and you take note of in the doc, you can create the task right from the doc okay.

So, I’d start there, then I’d think about, “Okay, what do we have going on?” And maybe you start with marketing, you know, maybe you are publishing your content. So you’re going to move over your content management process.

If you’re using something like Trello, you can actually import it, and it imports really well. So that it essentially looks just like Trello. What I’ve found with clients is that the way people organize in Trello can be done in ClickUp. But because ClickUp gives you some more flexibility on hierarchy and things like that, once you bring it over from Trello, I do recommend doing a review of it because I think there are better ways to organize, you know, processes, tasks, and the way that you manage it inside of ClickUp.

For example, I had a client that had one board in Trello, where she managed clients, she had a template task, and then managed all the clients in one board. So what we did when we work together as we actually took her board, and we broke it down so that each client had a folder. And then inside that folder were the list of the different types of projects that the client had hired her for. So if it was web design, and social media, or just web design, something like that. And we would break that down a little differently. So she didn’t need to manage all the clients in one place in one board.

And so then we just kind of instead of doing it all on one board, we kind of broke it down so that each client had a folder, and then she was managing each client’s project inside of a list.

So getting started, I would, again, either start with operations, things you do regularly, or if you have content, you know, your marketing or social media, I would move those things over if again, if you’re coming from Trello to ClickUp, you can import them, really it comes over pretty well. So you might want to do that.

If you’re starting brand new, I would figure out what your content process is, whether that’s writing it out on a Google doc and then putting it into ClickUp, I would start there and then come in here. And I would think about how do you need it broken down.

If you have multiple team members working on the process of let’s say, blog, for example, I would have a main task for the blog. And then I would have subtasks for all the pieces that are required to create the blog post, you know, create the images for it, review it and then set it up and schedule any of the social media that goes with it.

A lot of times coming from Trello, checklists are used. And checklists have a place in ClickUp. I think that when it is a separate task, when it’s a like copy is a very specific task or part of the whole blog post process, I would make that a sub task.

And then the blog process, meaning, anyone that’s managing the process, a checklist will be for that. But the copy subtasks will have its own checklist of items, like making sure that the different headlines are set to the right size, that the social media posts are written that, you know, there’s whatever else goes into the copy for it.

So I would start with that, you know, if blogging is your main thing, or if you have a YouTube channel or a podcast, and that’s something that you have ongoing, and it happens regularly, I would bring that over.

And then you know, prior to the next time you’re doing an episode so you can get it set up and you can run through it fully one episode or one blog or one week’s worth of social media run through it inside of ClickUp. It is going to take some time.

When we were getting the YouTube channel together. You know, we went through the process for I don’t know how many videos before we really were able to nail down what the process was. We had it written out in a Google Doc but as we started going through it, we were making changes to it and I’d say now we have it down, you know, pretty efficiently and all the instructions are there. But it took us a bunch of times to go through it to really nail it down.

So getting started, one, I would start with figuring out what your breakdown is of spaces, what do you need, if you don’t have clients, if you’re not a service-based business, then it might look a little bit different. If you’re blogging, you know, there’s going to be spaces for your own blog production, your social media. And then you’re gonna have things like affiliate, you’re gonna want to track that. And that might be inside of, you know, marketing, depending on how you want to break that down.

But I would start with a general hierarchy of how you think you want to break it down. Then I’d go into each of those spaces and decide how you want to organize if there’s a folder, or if it’s just lists. And then from there, then you can start actually putting in your processes.

I would just start with the ones that you’re using, and get one in and then start building on that. I mean, you could start moving over things that you don’t use very often first, and then keep your other processes in the other platform and then move those over later. But I think that moving the things over that you use right now, or on a regular basis will help you to get them refined more quickly, because you’re going to be going through it and with you and your team and so I really think that that is a good place to start.

And even if you just get the process and go through it a few times, you can always refine it, you can always add to it, you can always move things around. But that’s how I would get started with ClickUp.

So, I hope that was helpful. And I’m going to be doing more lives going through and showing the build out of the different things. So the next time I’m going to go over, I think I’ll go over dashboards next week and go over building one out from scratch to decide which things I’ll include in that. And that’ll be focused more on a client dashboard.

But I definitely appreciate any feedback. If you have questions. Or if you’re stuck on where to get started, feel free to put it in the comments. I definitely check them and we’ll respond or I can do a separate video if there was additional questions to this one.

So thank you so much for watching, make sure you subscribe to catch our future videos. We have a video coming out tomorrow about workload management. And I think it’s really helpful. We use the workload view a lot when we’re managing our team and figuring out our capacity for work. So again, I hope that was helpful and thank you so much.

More ClickUp Tips

• Figure out the ins and outs of ClickUp docs here!
• Get to see the levels in ClickUp Hierarchy and how to use them.
• Make life easier by setting recurring tasks in ClickUp.
• Find the main ways to take Notes in ClickUp for your convenience.
• Get to know all the ClickUp Integrations and how to use them efficiently.
• Want to modify your notifications? Here is how.

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Originally published at https://systematicexcellenceconsulting.com on September 14, 2021.