Well, hey you ClickUp champions, ClickUp curious or otherwise. Welcome in to ClickUp Weekly episode two. We've got a great show for you today. We're going to be talking about some of Zeb's posts and super agents. We'll look at a couple uh wish list items that I think will resonate with you, especially if you've used ClickUp at all already. We'll look at the change log as always. We'll tackle uh some trivia and we're going to look at a cool feature that ClickUp released in October um that I think not that many folks from uh from what I've seen even requests that have come out like hey this is a solved problem. I want to just highlight some of that um here as we go. Uh my name is Gray McKenzie. I'm the founder of Zen Pilot. We help teams streamline their operations in ClickUp and this show is for you. Everything that we're tackling here uh is meant to help you in your pursuit of excellence on top of ClickUp. So, let's go ahead and dive in. I am uh obligated to say this disclaimer at the beginning. ClickUp Weekly is my fault. It's not their fault. So, ClickUp Weekly is presented exclusively by Zenpilot. It's neither sponsored nor endorsed by ClickUp. Um, so we will have some of my friends from ClickUp on the show from time to time, but everything on here is my opinion. It's not uh representative of uh ClickUp per se. So, that's with that disclaimer being said, let's dive right into our release notes. And this is going to be the shortest segment of the show today because if we click into the change log, we will see absolutely nothing uh new this week. So there's no new updates here in the change log. Uh that doesn't mean ClickUp's not shipped anything. Um but there's nothing that's kind of grouped together into a larger release note. Okay. So with that, I actually I don't want to pull up ClickUp quite yet. Where we're going to go next is I want to take you into a rewind section. And so I want to go back and I want to look at something from 3 months ago um that uh pushed out. These came out in 3 uh.63 release notes uh back at the end of October. And there's this um task name contains trigger automation that is super helpful. So if you've never built an automation before, let's just jump into ClickUp here and I will take you through it. Okay. So for our automations here and I'm inside our delivery space inside a client folder and then we're on the specific list. Um basically what I'm looking for is I want to be able to create an automation. So basically you know if then type of action if this happens then there's some other action that we want the system to automatically take. And the big distinction between automations and agents in ClickUp or super agents in ClickUp. The big distinction here is automations are just deterministic. Hey if this thing happens exactly this is going to happen on the other side. um we can use them in conjunction. Uh so we can use and I'll show you how we actually use AI in this specific example um as we're talking through it versus an agent um is you know using thinking or reasoning powers to say hey I'm scanning for this and when I find things that generally match this bucket that I've been trained on then I'm going to take this action um or I might just happen you know in some other uh some other format. So uh let's go into automations and let's just create an automation. I just want to show you an example what this means. And like the common use case here would be um hey I've planned out our work for the next year with this client. We're going to deliver and this is less um common today that this happens exactly in this way. But what was super common back when I was running an agency um was you might sell or folks would sell an engagement and it was like, "Hey, we're going to produce a blog post every week and an email uh you know every two weeks and we're going to produce a new landing page and offer you know every quarter or something some kind of rhythm and frequency to it." And still most um most teams working with clients, you've got some real consistency in what those items look like. Um, but you don't necessarily have the content plan of, well, here's the blog post that I'd be producing six months down the road. So, what we might do is we might use templates to create a whole bunch of these. Here's our whole process for how we're going to do a blog post. And we might have created, you know, 15 of these um just to map out kind of what the next quarter is going to look like, but we don't necessarily know the um exact time and date or we don't know the ex we might know the date, but we don't know the topic for it yet. So, this might all be called something like this. uh you know blog post and then we put the blog title here at the you know at the end of it but that blog title is just a placeholder for something. It's kind of a dumb example but I'm just going to um show you what this would look like. So we might take like hey I only want it when a task is created and I'm going add a condition here for this and my condition is this new feature which is task name contains and um I might say you know is exactly or I might use rejects here so that I make sure I get hey only this type but when it contains exactly blog post or blog post and you might even say you know you might leave this in your template like placeholder or something there might be some other way that you want to do this but I've got some trigger of hey it contains the blog post then I want to take some action on it and that action might be renaming it. So a really simple way or kind of a you know this is not anything crazy like you you can have all kinds of ideas. We might want to do something with AI on the flip side of this. Obviously, we could do things like um you know, leave a comment and hey, I want uh or we might want some delay um or something else, but leave a comment, you know, at whoever the assigne is for this whole thing or whoever a watcher is or whoever created this, you know, go in and update the you know, blog title in the task, something like that. So, you can add a comment. But what is more helpful, this is why this is um even more helpful for folks who are scheduling out over a longer time and the purpose of scheduling all this ahead of time. Um one you get it planned early so there's no chance that you're going to miss it down the road to plan it. But the second big benefit of doing that is for your workload purposes. So you can now see hey what do I already have allocated out for all my current client work? How many hours are allocated are already allocated out uh into the future. So, an example here might be that we do something with AI. We reference something like um you know, maybe we add a specific doc. I don't know if we have anything in here. Let's just see if we've got anything in here already for HB specifically. Um but let's say [clears throat] we had a like a strategy doc that was getting updated. And so we might do something like um you know and we could we could build this out but basically hey I want you to reference this strategy doc that we already had built out or maybe it's being updated over time and maybe the trigger isn't when the task is created there some other thing. Um but based on this document look at the blog post titles that have been approved or that we've got written out here and go in and update each of the blog posts and based on date or sequence. Hey, this is the fourth task down, you know, chronologically. Well, go figure out from the from the um document how to update this. So, this is kind of a dumb example, but um this trigger can be used in so many different ways um to do that. And one of the most useful ways that I've seen so far is taking tasks deployed from templates, referencing other documentation somewhere that would tell you the answers, and saving somebody the time to go back and find it. And sometimes this is even done for ideation. I don't really like using it for ideiation, but I've seen this a couple different times, so I wanted to call it out. Uh some folks have said, "Hey, based on this document or based on this brief of the client itself, go in and name the task titles, like what you think our blog post titles ought to be or at least the topics um of what they should be. That works totally fine. I'm not morally opposed to it, but it's inefficient because I think you ought to do that brainstorming first in a doc. That makes sense to me." or in a, you know, in a task description or like do that brainstorming somewhere else first and then have it go update uh your your blog titles or whatever your deliverable is after that. Does that make sense? So that is kind of a quick hitter on and and we could do the same thing by the way. We could filter this down to just subtasks. So sometimes this would be like hey I actually am trying to find if a task name uh contains this. So another use case would be subtasks and the subtask name contains revision something like that. Uh maybe I want to um you know set a custom field and we don't have a revision field in here. Um but you know I want to add a value or I want to uh you know set a checkbox and maybe we've got some counter where we're counting like hey how many revisions of this happened? There's a bunch of different ways that you could design for this, but that's a common one too where uh teams are trying to count for account for hey, how many revisions do we have? And normally there's some amount of revisions. Like an architecture firm is a good example of this. Hey, you've got three rounds of revisions included in this. Um well, we need to know then once we get past three, we've got to leave a comment. We got to change the status or update a custom field and say, "Wait, like now anything here has to be cleared as a change request um with the client. they're agreeing to a to an additional scope of work or a a new rate for it. Okay, so that is um this feature that rolled out in October. I've seen a few people playing with it. Um but I've seen more kind of us leaning into it with clients. I mean like hey this would solve that use case remember that you were thinking about and that we hacked together in this other way. Uh you could do this before you just had to do it outside the platform. So, we'd send uh task details over to make or to another um thirdparty system, uh monitor it there, and then send back the updates. Now, it's in ClickUp, and it's just sped up the time to value uh pretty substantially. Okay, so I wanted to call that one out in our ClickUp Rewind section. Let's move on to what's not in the system yet and talk about a couple items on the wish list. Do you use Slack right now? And if you use Slack, are you using Slack Connect? I think uh ClickUp chat has just come so far and I talked about this last week. I think there's two main reasons to still potentially use Slack. One of them is Slack Connect. The ease of use of having all my conversations stay in one single workspace in my Slack environment, but I'm chatting with someone else from another team, a vendor, a partner, a client, and they're in their own workspace. Um it is super nice to have that uh interplay um where we can both live in our native environments but chat seamlessly between them. And so ClickUp connect pull this one up um just so we can look at this. The request is basically hey can we do the same thing? Can we build uh the same type of uh environment where at least our chats uh like if we're in a channel we can connect channels um and they work together. Click put out a survey which I'd encourage you to take if you have not yet. That actually this link still works to the survey uh back in April. Uh you can see they've merged in a handful of different posts here. Um [clears throat] but this idea would be super helpful. Uh I think from um chatting with Zeb, who we'll talk about here in a little bit, ClickUp's founder, uh there's maybe like a larger vision than just a a simple connect. And so I'm curious to see how this winds up uh getting solved. Um but this would be a killer feature. The other big um obstacle to overcome if you're looking at switching to ClickUp chat is just how many uh tool integrations are already there. So if you want to port every time someone fills out a form in HubSpot, there's a super simple workflow to just automatically send that notification into uh Slack. Um and same thing from a million different data sources. Uh, ClickUp doesn't have those all pre-built, so you need to build them yourself. We've got a ton of those pre-built. If you need help um building some connectors to make chat work better, uh, reach out and let us know. Um, we probably have, uh, you know, recipes that we can deploy relatively quickly. They like some templates that that could get you up and running um, without a whole a whole bunch of uh, custom development work. But it is super nice that in Slack, it's just pre-built in many cases. not not in all cases, but certainly in many cases. The flip side of that is um when you're not just using something off the shelf, I would still rather have a whole bunch of off-the-shelf examples um ready for you, but when you're not using something just off the shelf, it does give you the opportunity kind of like the the um constraint speed uh creativity. Um it opens up your mind to like, well, what do I actually want it to do? And if we were going to send it into ClickUp anyways, then would I want an agent to run off of that and automatically do something with it? Like what what else? What is the actual getting the info pushed in is only step one. That's just informing something that doesn't change performance at all. So what's the actual action we want to take off the back end of that? Um, and so there is an upside to it as well, but I still think it would be in ClickUp's best interest um to build more of those native integrations to feed data into into ClickUp as well. All right. Um, so that was kind of the first request was, hey, can we get ClickUp connect? Um, I will drop this I'll I'll drop all of these in the um in the YouTube description. Um, and I want to give a shout out to Ian for producing these videos. Um, Ian, when I say I will, I really mean Ian will, please. Um, and the second one, just so that you can upvote them, follow along with any updates there as well. The second one, this is not a specific request, but this is a remapping due dates from templates request. And so, I just kind of uh grabbed a bunch. And there's two main um, that's not true. There's three main ones here that all kind of fit into this category. Um, and I didn't find where ClickUps uh PMS are like pulling these together to to specific ones. So, here's one from way back in the day uh 2020, but it's got uh a little bit of recent activity. And then uh most of these are from pretty early on, but have been merged. And so, this one was the most popular where there were some merges um built in. And the use case, let's jump to ClickUp real quickly. The use case is I'm going to build a new task. I'm going to pull in a blog post template or some some template for this. So, I'm just going to use the short code to um you know, browse my templates, pull in something that I want. I can pull whatever I want. We'll use this blog post example. And I'm going to go ahead and use it. Well, it's pulling from the date that was set on the template itself. And the reason to have dates set on your template is because you can quickly remap it. And I'll show you what that looks like. So there's a whole bunch of subtasks here. All a part of this. And I'm going to go ahead and create the task without remapping that date. And I get some of the technical complexity behind this one. But this is going to get pulled in. The reason that I didn't remap it um there is because I now want to take that blog post that we just drafted and I'm going to say, hey, I want this to be due in eight weeks. and it's going to give me this option to just remap all of my tasks. And now everything using that timeline. This is why we had the timeline set in the first place. Um, so let's minimize this one. Now our timeline is all reset. It's up to date based on what we had. So it's really not a big uh deal. But it would be super nice if in that interface when I am pulling from this blog post template and I load it in and I click this and I say, "Hey, I want this in four weeks. Can that give me the option right there to also remap all my subtasks along with it? I'll create this just so you can see the difference. And I should have given this a different name, but uh just so we can see it a little more easily, but you'll see you'll see what I'm talking about here. So you can see it did update the parent task due date, but not all the due dates beneath it. So uh this is a really simple thing if people have been through you know clients have been through our training they understand how to use the system they know hey you just don't update it there in the first one. So if you need help rolling that out to your team uh we've done it plenty of times. This is not a not a huge issue but it would make the experience a lot better if we could uh remap this and especially for new users people who haven't worked with us. Um this would be super helpful. So, that's on my wish list for this week is um you know, ClickUp Connect. I realize that might be a longer term one. This remapping due dates. Um like the simplest simplest thing would simply be does this template deployed have have subtasks? Yes or no. If no, just ignore it. Let them reschedule. That's totally fine. Um does this have uh if it has subtasks, does do they have uh due dates? And does the parent task have a due date? yes or no. And then if the parent task has a due date and they try to change the parent task due date, just pop up a little flag saying, "Hey, if you set this, you know, all your subtasks are now going to be out of out of line with this." You can still uh reschedule them all. The Gant View is great for rescheduling them all. Um, but that'll be like a helpful warning in the system to help eliminate just a little bit of heartburn for some new users the first couple times that they do this. Okay, so that's the wish list. Let's talk about ClickUp in the wild this week. So, I just uh hit a couple different things. I got three things from Zeb. Zeb is super active on social here over the past week. And so, let's pull up a couple of these. Um, we've got this uh super agent. In fact, I'm going to scoot back. Let's pull this one up for context. ZedX. We have a thousand employees and 2,000 super agents. I have 20 agents that allow me to stay in founder mode. And um so here's just a screenshot of some of the different um agents that Zeb or super agents that Zeb has running. Zeb, this is your invite to come on ClickUp Weekly. Um we'll pull you on here at some point, but I think this would be super helpful to just walk through like, hey, what are these different super agents? Which ones are the most helpful and which are not? But there's a couple here. um you know this praise agent kind of like find people across ClickUp doing good work uh draft up maybe even send but draft like hey here's an encouraging word from a founder those things go a long way um [clears throat] if that's fully agentic then you know you you don't even know whether to trust it that's going to lose its meaning obviously but the idea of saying hey bring this stuff to my attention um that would have felt really unnatural to me, you know, 10 years ago. And now when there's a manager of someone else on my team who points out to me, hey, this person did good work in this area, like this would be worth you calling out, that's super helpful. And I don't think it makes it any less genuine then when I'm reaching out. Like the reality is we should have some specialization. I don't believe in a fully flat uh hierarchy or that everyone should know what everyone else has going on in the organization. I think there's a difference between having access to know what everyone has going on um which I think is super helpful versus actually being aware of it. It doesn't make sense to use your RAM um or your memory to pay attention to what someone else is doing when it really doesn't impact what you should be working on in the you know for your own specific role. Um so it's helpful to be aware but that takes effort and as the team grows and expands there's no way you know if you're trying to pay attention to what a thousand different people are doing there's no way you can keep up with it. So, I think that one's super cool. And then let's just uh dive into a couple others here. So, this get it done agent is an example. So, Zeb said, "I recently created Zeb get it done agent. It's been been my biggest time saver." Now, uh this is from a couple days ago. I never have to set reminders for things or follow up. The agently the agent persistently reminds other people when I explicitly tell it to and make sure it actually gets done. I can option optionally say shorthand like 2D for two days and then it goes ham until that task is done. The agent also tries to complete the task itself or give suggestions and helpful context. And I smiled uh to myself sitting here in my office. I smiled um as I was thinking about this. The quality of the agent's advice like this would either make me, you know, grateful if I'm on the other end of this. Uh like, hey, that's that's great. You got it done for me. You know, now I can go back and, you know, Zeb knows he doesn't have to worry about it. Uh or it would really piss me off and be like, no, don't give me this, you know, quote helpful context. This is not really that helpful um for me. And it's kind of like uh you know to a founder everything is simple. To somebody who's got this visionary brain it's just like I don't know just launch the campaign and get it out. Like this should be easy. It should take you like four hours and you're the person in the weeds actually doing it. It's like well I could put out a really crappy campaign in four hours but to do this well uh yeah this is going to take me a week to get this to get this done well. Um so I I could uh see that experience happen. But I do think this is the reason that one of our core values at Zen Pilot and I'll just pull up our about page here for [clears throat] a second. So we get these core values. One of them is I own my stuff. And the shorthand for this there's kind of like these little descriptors or catchphrases that we have for each of these core values and every month we're shouting them out. So, we had our um all hands meeting this past Monday and spent, you know, 20 minutes of our time together just kind of doing high five, shouting each other out for, hey, here's areas where we've seen you living out uh these core values. And the catchphrase for I own my stuff is when I tell someone I'll do it, it's as good as done. Meaning, uh once you say I'm going to own it, so [clears throat] we're talking about something, we decide who's going to own it. then what I can what the gift that that gives me is I can then forget about it. Um I don't need to keep that kind of actively open in my mind because I know they're either going to do it and come back and say, "Hey, this is done." Or they're going to run into a blocker somewhere. They're going to try and solve it with themselves, with somebody else. If they need me, it'll come back to me and I'll know about it there. But I don't need to hang on to it or have that open or wonder will it get done or not get done? That's kind of the definition for um I own my stuff. There's a couple other things here um that are a part of that which is I take responsibility when I mess up and handle criticism with a gracious heart. That uh criticism has to come from another one of our values which is I have your um I have your back as well and we are not trying to tear anybody down but we will be honest when there's constructive criticism to be given. Um but really it's this like gift to the team. I want to work on a team and I love working on a team right now where people own their stuff. If they say they're going to do something, there's not this repetitive. We've probably I have uh plenty of times like you guys have probably all been in working [clears throat] relationships or non, you know, like not necessarily uh co-working relationships where someone's like, "Yeah, I got it. I got it. I got it." And they never get it done. Um, so that uh is kind of like this made me think of it when I was thinking about this uh get it done agent. Um, if that helps give uh Zeb that assurance that hey, these things are going to be built out and it's one more system to help make that true in the culture. But what a gift that is. That's a cool cool super agent. An idea for you to steal. Speaking of ideas for you to steal, let's look at a couple others here. This is Zeb. This is two weeks old now. I'm legit saving four to five hours per day right now using super agents. Absolutely unprecedented even to me. Productivity unlock. Right now I have 29 AI agents working for me in the background. Here are some of my favorite use cases. One, a contacts manager. So reviews all my meetings, emails, tasks, then storesupdates a database of every external contact. It's perfect memory and perfect context. Two automatic follow-ups. My execution watchdog. It tracks every request or instruction I give. when I mention someone in ClickUp, it makes sure it actually gets finished. I can move fast, delegate freely, never worry about things silently dying in threads. So, this is uh that one that we just um had pulled up. I assume that this is the refining like what we just had pulled up is the refinement of this number two. And three, organization intelligence captures and retrieves history of what our company got done, decisions, projects, issues, etc., and DMs me an infographic each day of what everyone was working on. Uh, since infographics came out and we got a bunch of requests at our agency back in like 2011, 2012, 2013 to do more infographics, I've been a little bit hesitant. I'm like, but I do so much better if you just give me like, you know, 10 bullet points than this. I realize you put a ton more work into this fancy infographic. Uh, so anyways, that one made me made me wonder a little bit, but uh, Zeb continues on. Agents are scaling me so that I can still be in the details and in founder mode everywhere. Founder mode of course has grown in popularity as a term over the last year. I feel like the all-in podcast really uh helped popularize that, but that might just be my uh interpretation of it. Um [clears throat] so anyways, I thought that these were interesting. I think this contact manager, there's a number of tools that are trying to do this better. if you're using like Granola for call recording um or uh like Adio as a CRM um some and some of the personal CRM things that like people have built 4,000 different personal CRM and none has really gotten like major major traction. Um but I thought this was interesting. If you're using Obsidian or I use Reflect app uh for journaling and for um kind of like my personal knowledge base, uh that might be, you know, maybe this fits in ClickUp, maybe this fits somewhere else. I think organization intelligence is super helpful and the follow-up one for sure. So, I just want to share those as a couple ideas. What super agents, what have your experiences been? What super agents are helpful for you? And what I'd really love to hear is is there a problem you're trying to solve that you haven't gotten an agent working for yet? I'll be sharing um here in the next couple episodes, I'm going to share I'm going to pull like one super agent that I've got and just kind of do a deeper breakdown on these. So, I'm just sharing some ideas here today. Um but I'm curious to hear what your experience is, what's working super well, what's not. If you've got a great one, hey, record a quick video. We can plug it into um the show. And if you're struggling with something, send that in as well. Okay, that's enough of ClickUp in the wild. Let's keep going here. We're already pretty long, so let's talk about trivia time. Last week, ready? Here we go. Last week, we asked these three questions. Which one came first, ClickUp whiteboards or ClickUp Docs? Uh, we had a handful of people answer this one um incorrectly. Uh, but most people got this one right, which is, hey, ClickUp Docs to some degree have been in the product since inception or since early on. There was a big revamp to docs that was announced at level up in 2021 and that was also in ClickUp whiteboards was announced. So if you said ClickUp docs, congratulations. You were correct. Number two, what's the maximum number of hierarchy levels you can have in ClickUp? This was a little bit of a trick question. I said, let's exclude checklist. So if you think about this, you got your workspace at the top, you've got spaces, you've got folders. This is where the trick is because subfolders are uh in beta. So uh at some point in time this will be we'll add in another level there uh lists and by the way folders are not required. So uh but this is just what what can you have uh lists tasks and then seven levels of nested subtasks if you want to turn that on in ClickUp. So there are 12 uh levels of the hierarchy. We're excluding checklists. That number could go up to 14 once you have access to subfolders and if we included checklists. So that is a broad flexible. This is one of the things that drew me to ClickUp early on. I talked last week about the product velocity. Um, but the depth of the hierarchy suits uh client service businesses really, really well because yes, we've got our organization as a whole, then we've got departments beneath that, but then we've got these clients and these clients have multiple campaigns or projects. Each of those projects or campaigns is made up of a series of deliverables. Every deliverable has some set of tasks kind of associated with that. like hey what needs to actually happen here um by individual people every one of those tasks has a specific process uh to follow to get it done and so this um level of like the depth of the hierarchy of ClickUp is super helpful number three what was ClickUp's first major product innovation to be adopted by the broader project management software industry and um I've talked about this before but this is if you Google this one I don't think you'll find this exact answer, but um although maybe you will once this is live, but the idea of um view flexibility is kind of like this broader term for it, but really taking the same uh underlying data tied to a project or you know in ClickUp's case a list or a folder or something and being able to see that uh in whichever the same data but seen by different people depending on their preferences. So, if you're a project manager and you love seeing things in list view, ClickUp allows you to do that really well. But if you're a designer or a developer and you need your conbon board, it's like, hey, if I don't have boards, uh, then I quit. Um, ClickUp allowed you to do that. So, at the time, Aauna had uh, you could pick when you were setting up a new project, do you want to see it in list view or in board view? But you couldn't ever reverse that decision at the time. And nothing else had the same feature sets. ClickUp came to market and said you can see it in obviously you can see it on a calendar, you can see it in list view, you can see it in board view, you can see it in this view they had called box um view and uh and you all these different views of the same underlying data. That's obviously like that's not even something that would get your attention today looking at ClickUp versus other tools because everyone else has adopted and said, "Hey, that was a great uh innovative feature and uh has gotten on board now." All right, if you answered those three correctly, congratulations. You are a winner from last week. It's time to step it up here. Ready? We got two questions for you. Which existing feature in ClickUp has received the fewest updates in the past year? So, specifically, if you go to ClickUp 4.0 and you go to customize your navigation, you got 13 different options here. So, your pro pro tip is this is one of these 13 different options. I'm talking about which feature uh which one has seen the fewest updates in the past year. Okay, power users, you're going to know this right away. Everyone else, this might require a little bit of digging. Leave a comment here on the video with your answers. Don't cheat. Uh go in, take a guess, put it in there. Uh comment, and we'll pick a winner for next week. Uh second one non-Clickup but before partnering with ClickUp in early 2018. Uh we started conversations uh at the end of 2017 and then formalized the partnership in 2018. What did Zen Pilot do? So there's a little test for you. How well do you know my story? We'll tell a little bit more of that next week in episode three. And that does it for this week's show. Uh get involved. Please subscribe on YouTube. Answer the trivia question. share this out with folks who you know uh who love or are learning to love ClickUp. If you want to get involved, you want to be featured or even jump on a show with me at some point, email showzenpilot.com and uh and we'll go through those and figure out right fits and times and stuff. Make sure that you subscribed to FirstClass operations, get early access to the ClickUp 4.0 playbook. That's at zenpilot.comnewsletter. And a reminder, this show is my fault. ClickUp Weekly is presented exclusively by Zenpilot, neither sponsored nor endorsed by ClickUp. Hey, thanks so much for spending half an hour with me here today as we go through ClickUp Weekly. Excited to see you next week.