Welcome to episode number nine of ClickUp Weekly. My name is Greg McKenzie. I'm your host for today. I'm the founder at Zen Pilot and ClickUp Weekly is your go-to show for staying on top of what's new in ClickUp and how to get the most out of the tool. I'm so excited. We are talking about templates today. Both the technical management of templates in ClickUp. um they just unlock so much potential and speed in your workflow. But we're also going to talk about what we're seeing change with teams and what their templates like actually the the substance of the templates is actually looking like today. So there's some there's some big changes that I've observed and want to share with you. We're going to talk about MCP. We're going to talk about a bunch of like kind of minor features that rolled out or updates that rolled out this week in ClickUp. So we got a lot of good stuff for you here on the show today. Uh let's start with this. As always, ClickUp Weekly is presented exclusively by Zenpilot. We are neither sponsored nor endorsed by ClickUp for this specific show, so it's all my fault. If you've got an issue, uh, blame me. And then, let's dive right into release notes. We'll talk through kind of a a look back at ClickUp features. We'll dig into the wish list and more and more as we go. All right, ClickUp release notes. Let's jump right in. I've got five things I wanted to call out this week. In the official ClickUp change log, there are no updates for this week, but that doesn't mean nothing actually happened in the platform. So, I got five things I'm going to call out. First one, hide your own video tile in syncups. Syncups is ClickUps, video or audio chat feature, similar to Slack huddles. And especially on smaller screens or situations where um you're trying to preserve screen real estate or you just don't like looking at yourself all the time like most of us, um you now have the ability to hide your video tile on a syncup. So, if you're staring like I am right now at a teleprompter, I'm not reading anything off it. That's just where my camera is located. you know, then you've got the ability to make the other person's face larger, which makes a little bit more human connection. So, that's great. Second one, start timer on any task without opening it. Let's jump into ClickUp and let's just take a look at what this looks like. Um, so we'll go, let's see, let's just go to a list here. In any list view, you've had the ability for a while now. This isn't there by default, but you can add for years and years. You could start time on a task without having to open the task by having that column set here for time tracked. So, all you need to do to add that is just go here, time tracked, you know, toggle it off, toggle it on. You can do all that. And once it's there, then you've got the ability to start time and start tracking your time as you're working, right? But not every view has unlimited customizable columns that you can drag and resize and move around and add or subtract or do whatever. And so, this feature is actually really nice. And all it is is when you see a list of tasks or a a view that has tasks somewhere and you right click on it, you have this new start timer button. How cool is that? Super minor uh UX feature, but it's actually pretty helpful. So, I wanted to call that one out. That's maybe my favorite one from this suite. Next one's very, very niche. So funny that I would say niche if I was talking about your market selection, but I was so used to hearing niche if this is so strange. I've never thought of this before, but niche if it's like, hey, this is a relatively uh minor use case. We won't spend a ton time on this. Time estimates in ClickUp. We can set time estimates on these tasks. Now, I would not recommend normally that you have multiple assignees, but let's just assume that both of us were assigned to this task. And you go to time estimates, and you can see there's only a total time estimate, and that's because we don't have the click app for time estimates. I'm going to assume, let's just open up click apps here. Go to time estimates. Yeah. So, we don't have this little option at the bottom that says estimates per assigne uh toggled on. Now, I won't turn it on here. Actually, what what's the worst? What can we mess up? Let's go ahead and do it. Um, I toggled on estimates per signing. Now, it's just going to split that hour evenly across us. We may need to Nope, we need to run a refresh. So, by default, it's just going to say, "Hey, you had an hour." Now, the reality is this is an hour meeting. Now, that's going to change what this looks like. Now, we need a two-hour time estimate. And so, that would have been the other option for something like this meeting task is, you know, this task just wouldn't have anything. This would have two. And now we both have an hour um allocated to us. Okay. So, that's all native and ClickUp that's been here uh for a long time. I'm going to go ahead and go back to an hour and then I'll remove remove myself. So anyways, that's how that feature works. What is cool, what's been added this week is you can now set those time estimates by assigne via the API. By default, it's going to split it. And probably 80% of the time you want it split, but there are definitely times where you do not want it split. The person, we're all attending the same meeting, but the person who needs to prep, facilitate, and send out follow-up is going to spend more time than the person who just shows up and may even come late for 15 minutes or something. So, uh, and there's a whole bunch of use cases like that. So, this is a pretty cool, um, feature set to have now in the API that was available, um, in the app before. Then we got, uh, time sheet approvals by quarters. This is again a pretty minor one, but I caught this in the UI. Um, so if we go into our time sheets here and we went to approvals and I wanted to see this over time period. So, if you're not familiar with time sheet feature, all your time entries, all tied to tasks get logged and they're going to show up in here. We could toggle this and we could see uh time entries or time sheets. And you have if if you have the approval feature turned on, I can submit this for approval and say, hey, I want to submit my time sheet. Someone else is then going to get tagged in, you know, to approve it. And you could see this time period. I could look at, hey, what are the time sheets that are open or to review over this week or this month? And now we've got this quarter option as well, which is actually a pretty handy filter to be able to grab it. So, that's super minor one. I won't spend any more time on that on it than that, but I noticed that uh in the app this week as well. And then Gant, um I think I've called this out briefly here before, but this ability to export by date range is actually really helpful in a Gant view. So, let's pull up a Gant view here, and we'll go look at target here, and then go to a Gant view of this. We'll hide spaces here on the left so that we're just looking at this. Okay. So this if we zoomed way out here, you know, went way way out, um we could see, hey, this is actually taking quite a while, you know, Q2 of 2025 to uh you know, wherever this winds up finishing up with our with our very last item, but we're looking at close to a year of stuff, but I'm I'm mostly focused on what's happening in this specific area. So I might zoom back in on this or, you know, I come in and I can expand this. I'm trying to show uh some of these specific items what needs to happen. Well, when I went to export it, if I ever needed to export it to PDF or PNG previously, there wasn't this option to set these date ranges. And so, I might have something that was from Q2 of last year, but really I'm I'm only focused on kind of, hey, what's going on, you know, in in this current month. And so, I want to update this and say, no, I don't want to see from last May. I actually just want to see, you know, from January to now or I just want to see a month at a time or two months at a time or something like that. And so the ability to customize this just makes this a ton more readable when I go export it and use it. So again, if you're a Gant person, you're going to be like, "Hey, that is great." And if you're not a Gant person, when you receive one, you'll appreciate it. And other than that, you'll probably never think about it again. That's okay. U but I want to call that out because that is also new in the platform. All right, let's keep going. Let's talk about the rewind. And so this is where we'll spend probably the bulk of our time here today. I want to talk about template management and timelines and two different pieces. So the the first piece is just uh templates themselves. So let's get this to pop open in terms of how we're managing templates. And there's some uh you know there's a bunch of ways to do it, but you've got the template um center from ClickUp uh themselves. And so that is, you know, if we want to go in and look at templates, browse templates. This is the template center. So here I can see a list of all my templates, I can click on one. I can use the template. I can see a little bit of information about it. But the reality is I can't see all the tasks. I can't see how long does this take, where does this go, all like so much information about a template itself. And so what we're doing is we have a space for templates. We'll keep this protected so this won't be uh it won't bog up um most people won't even see it in the app. So there's no impact from a you know oh will will it be a distraction if we have another space there. So that's kind of solved for and then we're also protecting the templates like and and we're just keeping the latest version of the templates a live copy of it here in this space so I can quickly go through and say hey when we do account management you know what's the process for this monthly client performance review like what are we actually doing? here's our checklist, here's how long the time estimates are, all that kind of stuff. Um, so I've got these templates ready to go and it's easy to go in and see them if I need to see a live copy of it. So that's where our actual kind of live latest version of the template is. And then we've got this template catalog where we're basically just documenting all that, keeping a list of um these items. Folks can send submit requests. So if hey, I need a template um they can submit it. And this template center, we should do a whole video on this at some point. Like there are so many cool automations and features built into what we're doing in this template center. So all the tasks for hey something got submitted it's going to trigger off all the tasks for hey what do we do with that to process an idea once something gets drafted well what are the tasks to get it reviewed get it approved get it saved in the template center all that's there if you purchase the Zen pilot ClickUp install so our entire kind of ClickUp starter starter point this will all be in there you'll get to see all the automations how it all works together it's it's really really neat and if you've worked with us in a onetoone capacity we've we've led you through an implementation you're already trained on this and you know exactly how to how to use it for your team. Um, but if you haven't, um, that's basically how we are setting up the mechanics of templates. And I wanted to share that because I get a ton of questions about, uh, templates themselves. And so, I just wanted to do a super quick kind of sneak peek into what that looks like. At some point, we'll do a longer one and we can talk through some of the automations and how to build it out. Honestly, like it's a good amount of work to build it out. Uh, it makes a ton of sense for a lot of teams. Uh, like I think for pretty much everybody, buying it from us is going to save you way more time than you're going to put into building it all out. aside from the fact that you're going to get our template library uh built in there as well. But this is not a sales pitch for our product. I just wanted to give you some of the mechanics about it because what I really wanted to talk about was the second part which is what are we seeing in templates themselves? How are teams building templates differently today or what are the updates that they ought to be making but aren't making yet. So let's spend just a minute on that. And the first thing I would say here is we have all these deliverables. So so this is a pretty old version of the template library. If we uh actually I'll pull up the sidebar here and just go to this other view so that we can see it. So this version has a pretty old view of um some of the let's just grab you know an example here and we'll take uh maybe email as an example you know how would we go do kind of step by step through what does it look like to build out a drip campaign for a client and as AI is growing like is just impacting all the work that we do so drastically the big change that I'm seeing a lot of teams be behind on and I wanted to record this to share this specifically with you is uh that they are leaving these longer timelines. Here's something that is going to go out. This will be done by June 29th. This is hilarious that you know this was this specific version was created back in uh 2022 or early you know whatever. Um but we're going to start it. What is that? Is that a month? 29th is just more. So uh yeah 30 days earlier is when we need to get started on it and then we're going to move through to these processes. Now, obviously, there's some revisions in this and we're working with the client. And so, this is a good example of a like also take this as some inspiration when you have a lot of revision points with clients. You need to set realistic timelines in your templates because otherwise you can't live by the due date is the due date model um as part of your project management methodology. Um, and we've done a a bunch of um work on the methodology and shared all that. So, if you have not seen that yet, go to zenpilot.com/methodology and you can see, in fact, I'll just pull it up here. you can see what I'm talking about. Um, let's go to methodology, you know, so you can see, hey, why do we prioritize work using due dates? How does that happen? You can watch a whole video on why that's important and all these things. Um, work in concert together. So, we want to be realistic in ter in terms of setting deadlines and timelines for this stuff because it's so much easier to move tasks forward than it is to constantly try to be shuffling things backwards. Then we wind up missing deadlines. But here's the reality. The reality is for most teams in their ClickUp templates, they ought to be dramatically compressing the timelines and shortening them and realizing, hey, we can plan it out. Uh we can get a brief, we can get the next person in. We can have a lot of this research done based on assets we've gathered from the customer, tapping into their CRM, tapping into wherever their records are, their customer support center, their knowledge base, all that stuff. All of the research that used to happen and take all this time and then the writing. A lot of this stuff can just frankly get compressed down. Do we still need humans in the loop? Absolutely. at this point. Um, and if you want to stand out, like the more time and attention you put into it, but the time and attention is not in like, oh, we got this crap from AI that we have to go tweak, but at least it's 40% of the way there. Uh, that is some of the time and attention that needs to go into it. But most of the time and attention that needs to go into it is in training the AI tools that you are using to do better research to write better to write in this client's tone and voice specifically uh to write with these objectives in mind um to design with this outcome um for this specific audience. So a ton of that time and effort needs to actually go into it's like R&D. It really is how do I train AI more than how do I spend the time taking what this AI did halfway or did somewhat poorly and now I've got to go improve it. I think you're just like living with your head kind of under the sand if you're like, "Hey, AI just has to produce slop." Because that's not the case at all. It's just, hey, poorly trained AI produces very, very poor slop. Well-trained, it's incredibly impactful. So, uh, you're going to allocate more of your time towards that and that won't always show up on a client byclient basis. Like a lot of those improvements are going to happen. There is certainly client byclient work that you'll be doing as well. And obviously, you know, there's all the disclaimers. You need to have an AI policy in place um, for your work. You know, you've got to be super clear on how data is handled, who's doing what, um, who's touching that. There's there's a million implications of this, but when I look at where time is actually being spent and the mismatch between uh reality and templates that causes frustration for teams, um so on one hand, the teams who are very AI forward, they need to go update these templates. And what I'm saying to you is if you are not yet in that place and this still feels pretty good, you are behind and you need to update your workflow. Um, and you've got a big opportunity to compress this and drive client results faster than you have before, substantially faster, and you're going to get better and better and build a model that improves for your customers over time. Like we are so fortunate the the leverage that you get from deep expertise in one specific place is even more important than today than it was 5 years ago, which was, you know, more important than it was 5 years ago. like the the continued uh value of specialization and deep expertise is massive because someone's got to be able to guide, train, and inform our AI teammates who are helping us out. Does that make sense? I want you to take your timelines and imagine, hey, that email drip campaign that used to take us realistically by the time that we did client reviews and all this kind of stuff, that realistically used to take us a month. We get that knocked out in a week. Um, and we are not to get to the same level of quality. We may be investing the first handful of times that we do this even more time than the 12 hours we originally had because we're working to try to train our AI, but we are going to build on that over time. The training is certainly going to get easier. The quality of all these things is going to get easier. But this might take more time at the very beginning, uh, more hours, but a compressed timeline. And then long term, what's going to happen is it's going to take less and less and less time, which is great. we get to move to higher value, higher impact things for our clients. And that's the direction, that is the race to the top, not the race to the bottom that I want you to avoid. All right, I'm done preaching. I just want to share a little bit about that because I just keep seeing this. Um, and so I want to share what's on my mind on my heart and and had a really cool conversation this past week uh with Jeff Eardly who's the CEO at Parallax and they've got this awesome resource management like planning utilization forecasting software for agencies and we're just sharing notes on the same the same type of thing like hey how fast these iterative cycles go um we've got to be updating the way that we think about our work to reflect that as well. All right let's talk about the wish list. This will go super quickly. What do you want to see in ClickUp? Leave a comment. Make sure you're subscribed to the channel here. Leave a comment. Let me know what you want to see in ClickUp. But, uh, ClickUp MCP improvement. I have a link to the feature request here. And I'm going to put this in the show notes because I want you to upload it. This is very niche. Uh, there's 12 of us who have, uh, said this so far. So, super simple. Let's jump into ClickUp for a second. I could take a um, a task and I could add this to another list in ClickUp. And the most common use case is if I'm working with a client, I've got one list that my internal team is working out of and then let's say a task hits the status of client review. It would we could use an automation and automatically add it um to another list uh that the client has access to and has been invited to. Super nice. So, you're going to use that like pretty frequently if you're doing uh client work. Well, right now that's no problem in the app. But if you're using ClickUp via MCP uh or you're using the ClickUp MCP and you're using it through um a different uh LLM or or chat tool, I would love to have the ability to add a task to multiple lists directly there. Um super helpful. It's so cool. Use if you've not played with the ClickUp MCP, like definitely use it. It's it's pretty awesome. there are the amount of workspaces that are just getting inundated with crap that's going to be somewhat challenging to clean up until uh the AI tools get get even better because of the click of MCP that's also there that's that's but that's to me that's a cost that's a price of admission it's like okay you know these eight people at the on your team went crazy with this thing and they said hey plan out a project for this plan out a project for this two different people tried to plan out the same project nei both were like a 70% good plan neither one was actually the dialed in plan and now you got all this crap to clean up and it's confusing people. So, you've got the ability to inflict a ton of pain on your team with it. Please, if you're not working with us in the blueprint process, which for many of you, you ought to be. But go through your own process and like map out, hey, how does this thing actually work? What are the rules of engagement we have for our team? How are we training our team? What are the principles? Because you get all that stuff documented and you've got a really strong unified starting point. Then the power of all these AI tools on top of that is incredible. you don't do that work first and you jump right into, hey, you plan a project for this, you plan a project for that. Uh, it's going to be a disaster. It just is. Clickup in the wild. So, this was awesome. Uh, I'm going to pull this up. Brad Daniels on the ClickUp team um talked about and he he did this awesome video on uh how the help center team has um been working with super agents in here. So, product briefs to scoping to first drafts. I'm going to try something a little strange here. I'm going to play this. >> I'm going to move away from this tab because Oh, it didn't work. Huh. Uh, let's try and figure out what's going on. >> Click. >> There we go. Okay, so uh the video I've just got it player and player um pulled up here. I'm using the DIA browser, which I love by the way. And anyways, he just walks through in this video >> what they do. >> And you can see the cool thing here talking about compression. like this was a good reminder of that is just how fast they work through this. Um, if you could read the time stamps on this, which I'm I'm sure you can't, but you know, you got the draft new article agent and it gets done at 4:40 p.m. and then recommended help center changes get drafted and they're done 9 minutes later. Uh, there's another example. Here's a 350. The product brief writer wrote it at 350, I think, is what that says. uh help center scoping got done at 358. And anyways, this is a long way of saying we've talked about this with super agents and connecting them together. And I thought that this was I don't want to spend every single week on super agents, but this is a great example of how that works. Let me just expand this. Um instead of a writer on click help center team having to, you know, log in, click through the app. I realize that's not really how things are working at this point in time, you know, and then pulling together content or context for every new article. they've got these agents, this should say agents. And so, you know, a PM internally or the product team is notifying, hey, we've got a product change or there's a feature that needs documentation. So, we've got that, that's kind of like the trigger for all this. And then we got a super agent that pulls all the relevant context. So, you know, they know where to go look for that stuff. Um, we get the like the brief built out that gets into a scoped outline. You know, we get the draft of the help center article. we get um an agent that says, "Hey, here's what's inconsistent now with this and now the rest of the help center that's now outdated. Like, how do we update that?" Uh ultimately get back to the to the human in the loop, like the human team for it. But that whole process in Brad's demo, and I actually think this is not like that fast of a process in AI terms. Um it's not like, oh yeah, this is done in, you know, two and a half minutes. uh you actually see it as they're tagging these different super agents in and working through the process. It actually runs over the course of you know 40 or 50 minutes um as it's going through and building it all out. Uh but it's just wild how much is uh possible. So I wanted to to just highlight that to Brad. great work, not only being a big part of uh building out that workflow and giving us more reliable uh help center docs, faster updates to those um but also for sharing that. That is huge. Like I love when people share u the work. So uh Brad, you're you're our highlight here in ClickUp in the wild this week. We'll we'll link to that um LinkedIn post and full video in the show notes here as well. And that brings us to your favorite part of the show, trivia time. So, trivia time is just a personal passion of mine. I love doing trivia with my kids. I love doing it uh with friends. And so, we've got a couple uh questions to walk through here. All right, ClickUp Weekly Trivia time. Let's look at last week's trivia questions. The first question was, according to ClickUp's official documentation, when will ClickUp 3.0 be fully deprecated? You can't switch back. And I purely did this as a reminder for you. March 27th, 2026. That's your deadline that you're running against. Make sure you've got a good 4.0 transition plan. If you don't, reach out to us here at Zenpilot. We can help you out. Two, which ClickUp 4.0 feature earned my highest grade in our 2026 review? Uh, there are a bunch of good contenders, but the winner, drum roll please, is the workload view improvements. Uh, Teams Hub was right up there, but the workload view is just so much better. Um, they made great strides and improvements there, and that was consistently a pain point for anybody who does a lot of traffic management. um or heavy project management across a team resourcing, forecasting, all that kind of stuff. And if you're curious about that, you can go watch our full 4.0 review or read the 4.0 guide um on our website as well. Okay, ClickUp Weekly Trivia Time. This week's trivia. In April of 2022, what company did ClickUp acquire to improve their unified search capabilities? And if you're unfamiliar with unified search, this is the ability to connect a bunch of different apps into ClickUp. Hit command K here. Let me get out of this. And um and you [clears throat] can see, you know, I can link a bunch of different apps together to get results from. Okay. So, which company did ClickUp acquire in April 2022 to improve their unified search capabilities? Is it Slack Dash, Slap Dash, Searchify, or Quickfind? If you know the answer, drop it in here. This is kind of a niche or niche to go back to earlier. uh acquisition uh but it's been impactful and so I wanted to bring a little um blast from the past here in leave your guesses or hey I know this for sure I remember this vividly uh notes as a comment on the YouTube video uh and we will share the answer next week. All right, make sure you're subscribed on YouTube. Um, if you have content that you'd love to get featured here, um, you want to give somebody a shout out in the community or you've got ideas to make the show better, email show@zenpilot.com. And make sure you're subscribed to Firstclass Operations, our bi-weekly newsletter for Sharper Operators at zenpilot.com/newsletter. Thanks so much for being with us this week and we'll see you next week for ClickUp Weekly episode