How To Manage Your Ideas in ClickUp

Have you ever had a brilliant idea, but don’t know how to transform it into a task with steps you can follow to make it happen? Today we have a video tutorial to show you how we use ClickUp to manage your ideas — and make them a reality!

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

There are many different ways to organize your ideas in ClickUp, but the way we do it is and what we recommend is to start by creating a folder called Ideas. You can make lists for each of the platforms or types of content that you’ll be creating.

Then, you can add custom fields in each of our lists where you can put different things, for example, websites for inspiration or images. You can choose between seeing them at the folder or just list level, it’s completely up to your own preferences.

In this example, we are using an idea for a YouTube video, but of course, you can adapt this to whatever you are creating. Once you have your idea, you create a task and move it to the corresponding space, folder, or list. Then apply your template and send it through your regular process.

You can add categories to make your organization easier. For example, you can add a link to the website you got inspiration from.

One of our favorite things is that you can quickly take a screenshot from a website that you like and save it as a website inspiration in your list; we recommend adding the URL to the description and even writing what you like about it.

Another useful way is adding bookmarks to your ClickUp lists, and the best thing is that you can also add screenshots, and then you can access it whenever you need to.

Watch Amalie Show You How To Manage Your Ideas in ClickUp:

Read The How to Manage Your Ideas In ClickUp Video Transcript

Amalie Shaffer 0:05

All right. Well, welcome back to ClickUp Mastery. My name is Amalie Shaffer, I am with Systematic Excellence Consulting. And today I’m going to go over how to manage ideas in ClickUp.

So I’ve already created a couple of just a place to start from, just a couple of ways to manage it. And again, when I show these examples, this is just one way of doing it. But I want to at least give people a place to start from.

So for this, what I’ve done is I’ve actually inside of marketing, I’ve created a folder called ideas. And then I made lists for each of, let’s say, the platforms or the different types of content that I might be putting out there. So I chose to create a list for YouTube ideas, code ideas, website, inspiration, and blog topics, so blog ideas, so I’ll because I want to just show kind of some of the differences.

Right now I have the ideas folder selected, which allows me to see all of the lists at the same time, which might be good to do that, when you’re planning out all of your content over, you know, if you’re looking at, okay, what are we doing for the next, you know, three months overall. And you’re trying to see how they all fit together, maybe how the YouTube topics are supporting the blog topics, or the quote cards that you’re putting out on social media. You can look at it that way.

Now what I’ve done is inside the list, I’ve set some different custom fields here that I didn’t set at the folder level I set, the only thing I set there is the source, which is a website custom field. Now I am going to show you in the website inspiration, I have another custom field for the image for screenshot, and I’ll show you that in a second.

But I wanted to show how I’ve kind of broken it down. Now if you want all of these custom fields that I have created in each of the lists, to show up at the folder level, all you do is hit the plus. And you go to fields, and then you can see which fields were already created. So let’s see.

So I can add website, let’s see, labels, images, I will use this field. And then it’s showing up now where I’ve had that. So we have the source. And then I also let’s see, I don’t want to create a new one. Hold on a second… library. Let’s use topic. And we’ll do labels, we’ll use category. Because on some of them, I’ve set it as a category.

Now, I could switch them over so that they’re not separate. I just wanted to show the different options for the custom field. So like drop down. I’ve used I did topics instead of using as a label. So you have a couple of different ways to do this, I recommend setting it up first. So that way it makes it easier when you’re going through and setting this up.

So let’s see. References asset folder. No, I think that’s fine for now. Okay. So now we’ve set up the different custom fields at the folder level, if you don’t want them, you can just remove them and only have them set at the list level. That’s totally up to you.

Now, I want to talk about actually getting information in here. Well, first of all, let me talk about once you have an idea, like what I would do with it. Okay, once I have an idea, let’s say for YouTube, and I want to actually use the idea. So I have my topic and I know that I want to put this into production. If I select this, I want to move the task, I’ll go to Marketing YouTube production, and I’ll go to production. And it’s asking me about moving my custom fields over. So I’ll select all Add Selected custom field. And then what that does is it actually goes into the content management. I put it into the wrong one, oh, well, I think I put it over here. Whoops. Anyway, I’ll move it.

So we’ll actually, I’ll move it to we’ll go to Marketing, we’ll go to Content Management, we’ll go to YouTube production, that’s where I want to go. And in to-do we’ll go to topics, and I’ll hit done. And we want to select the custom fields. So now where I’m actually going to take action if I go over here, now I can come in here.

And I can apply my template and then send it through the normal process that I am, that I have already set up. And then I would so I would organize my ideas. And then I would move it to production.

And then from there. So if I go back to ideas, this is just where I would continue to manage and organize my ideas for the different topics and things like that. Okay, so that’s how I would do that. Now, if I’m going, let’s just look at YouTube, for example, I want to have the topic or category, something like that.

So I know, is this a tutorial video? Is this a live video? Am I doing a review of something. And I’ve done it in two different ways. So you can do a drop down menu here like I have, or you can do labels, which is what I have here.

And so then I would put you know, whatever the title is, and then if you have notes or something, you can always add text, you could add a longer text area where you can just put notes, a note about it, or you could open it up and put the notes about the topic here. Like if you just want to say you know, I’m going to do this video about this specific process and kind of go from there, you could do that. Now, let’s say it’s quote ideas. So what I’ve done is I just pulled a couple of quotes here.

And you could also do some sort of category, if you wanted to, you could do a category option. So if it’s, you know, category, the category one is what I applied to the blog ideas, which I’ll show you in a second. You know, for source that might be the link to where you’ve gotten the inspirational quote, or whatever. So I’ve done it two ways. One way is I actually copy and pasted the quote here.

And so if I just open this up, I have the quote that I wanted to use. Now if you want the source of that you can use the source, this is a website custom field, or what I’ve done here is I actually took the inspirational quote, and it’s just a website, and then I put the link to the website, and it adds an attachment down here to the website that I pulled. So I have that website pulled open. And so I want to show you here, so let’s say I’m looking here, and I like this quote, right, so I want to, I’ll just copy it here, and I’m going to go up to my Chrome extension, and I’m going to go to a new task.

And now it’s going to, oh, it pulled the other code that I was going to do. So let’s say this is one of the quotes that I wanted to do. I can, just pulled one that I had already put there. So if I do create new task, it’s going to create that task.

So let’s say I want to do this one. And I just do this. I do a new task, I can put it in title. I can select ideas and I want to put it in my quote ideas. And then for the description, I can grab the link that I want, you know, I can put the link there to where I found it. And then I just hit Create new task. There we go. And now it’s creating the new task that I want.

So I’ve done it two ways, either pulling the full URL here, and then creating a task from that or individual quotes so that I can pull them from there so that if we go over to our quote ideas, I now have the quotes that I want. And then again, you could put the different categories. These are for the blog topics, they don’t necessarily apply.

But if you want to add new categories, we could edit the field, and then maybe we do like inspirational quotes or something like that. Or, you know, maybe if you do, this is like the Tuesday quote or something, you know, if you have, you know, maybe a Thursday quote, like that, you could keep a custom field. And so then, you know, you’d be able to say, this is the Tuesday quote, this might be the Thursday quote, Tuesday, and then Thursday, and then Tuesday or something like that, if you wanted to do it that way you could, and then the source can be the link.

Now, when you’re creating tasks from the Chrome extension, you can’t fill out the custom field here. So what you can do, which you might feel, you know, maybe it’s a little redundant, you don’t want that extra work. But you can copy this, go to the custom field and put the source there, so it’s easier to find. And that’s just one way of doing that.

Now, let’s look at the website inspiration. So when, and I accidentally put this in the wrong place. So let’s delete that. And I’ll tell you why I look at other ones in list and why I look at this one in the board view is because I have I pulled a screenshot from the website. So this is my friend Greta’s website. And I have it pulled up here. And so I’ll show you exactly how I did that. This is for her naming, helping to name offers. And this is her sales page for that service. And I really love her website. So I wanted to use it as an example. But let’s say Okay, so I want to take a screenshot of this, and I want it to be an entire screen. And then if I just hit done.

And then what I want to do is this is going to now show up with the screenshot that I wanted, and I want to hit attach to task. I want to create a new task. And I’ll call this website. And then I really like the colors and layout, you know, you can say why you like it. And then if you want in the description, you could grab the link to it and go ahead and put that there. And then I’ll create a new task. Oh, it’s in quote ideas, whoops, put in the wrong area. Okay, so let’s fix that.

So if I go over here, I go to quote ideas. Let’s just go ahead and move this really quickly over to marketing ideas, and we’ll just put in website inspiration. Okay, so let’s go over to website inspiration. Now, the reason I put this way is so that I could actually see what I’m looking at. And if you don’t like the pictures there, you can actually unpin them, I just have them pinned. So you can unpin it so that it’s not the cover image. But if you want it to be the cover image, then you can pin it in. if I want to open this up, I just open it up, and then I can see that it’s pulled the screenshot here, let me oops.

And it’s pulled. Yep. So it’s just pulled this, the top part of it. And, you know, that way, so I can see kind of what the inspiration is, and then I’ve put the link to it in here in this other one. So then I can, you know, just start to gather different ideas, you could create some different list statuses where maybe it’s design, maybe you like this one for the copy, maybe another one you like for the layout, or color, something like that.

So let’s say we like that, we’ll just rename this one to colors, okay. And then what I would do is I’d move them to the not started status so that way it’s an active thing because this is just idea-gathering. So if we do that, then maybe you know, we like this one for the colors. We like this one for the design, and then we can start to organize our ideas that way. And then for the blog one, I like it in the ListView.

And so something else I did here is I pulled the- I created a custom field for images. And I have the Unsplash website open. So what I’ve done is blog one, and then I put the categories here as labels. And then I put the link to the image. So you can either have the link to the image, or you can actually download the image and attach it here. And we can attach multiple images here. So if I go over here, and let’s say, what’s the other topic is coffee recipes. So if I go over here, and I type in, let’s do coffee, let’s just type in coffee, see what comes up. And let’s say we really like this one, because this is kind of the inspiration for the images for this blog topic.

So if I go over here, and let’s say we just want to grab the link for it, to come back to it later, I can do that. And I can put the source here, I can put it there, or I can actually upload the image that I just downloaded. There we go. And now it is attached. And now you can see what the inspiration is. And if I had an additional image, I could totally add that. And I can have multiple images attached here.

If there’s some sort of inspiration that you’re trying to look for specifically for that, that blog. And then again, for any of these, once I’m ready to take action on them, I would move them to the actual process. So like social media production would be where I’d put the quotes, the blog production would be where I’d put the blogs and the blog topics once I’m ready to take action on them. So that is how I would organize the ideas.

And let’s see, if I open this up. It’ll show the images. So if I click on this, then I can see the image that I’ve attached, you know, to say that this is where I’m kind of getting the ideas, you can also add comments to this. So if you have, you know, your design, or maybe your graphic designer, is, you know, pulling images and you want to leave a comment to say, “Hey, this looks great”, or, you know, “I’d rather you know, something else” or whatever. So you can do that.

And then again, we have the link to the actual image that we pulled. And again, while you’re doing this, oh, you can get 30% off, if it’s all pop up. The other thing again, so what you would do is you click on ideas, now you can start to see all of them. And you can see the different ways that we’ve organized it. I don’t recommend necessarily having topic category topics like that I just wanted to show different ways of organizing it.

And yeah, so I think that for this, it’s a great way to keep yourself organized with your ideas as you see things or you like a certain landing page, or you come up with a quote that you really love. But you’re not ready to take action on it. There.

This is a really great way to organize your ideas. And you know, just to keep them in one place versus trying to go find you know, where you put that bookmark or you know, whatever. One other thing that you can do is if you wanted to create a bookmark. So now this is bookmarked Greta’s website.

And so if I just change this to the website inspiration, I can save and it asks me if I want to include a screenshot. I do. I go ahead and hit save bookmark. This is just the other way to do that, which I forgot to mention. So now if I go over here, you can essentially create bookmarks for oh, so here’s the actual bookmark that it pulled.

So if I click on this, right, it’s given me the link right there in the task name, and I can pull up her website as I need it. So just another great way to keep things organized. This could be articles that you want to read or articles that will apply to you. If you’re looking to do some linking inside of your blog posts. You could create subtasks for different blogs that you want to link to inside of a blog that you’re writing or something like that.

So I hope that was helpful. I hope this gives you some ideas and inspiration on how to keep your ideas organized. Make sure you subscribe to catch our future videos. Again my name is Amalie, I’m with Systematic Excellence Consulting and I’m really grateful that you were here to watch this video. Alright, bye.

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Originally published at https://systematicexcellenceconsulting.com on December 22, 2021.