Welcome back to ClickUp Weekly. We've got a great show for you today. We're going to be talking about dashboards in ClickUp and how to keep them more organized than you ever have before. We're talking about text stack management and a cool way to use custom task types in ClickUp to help you manage your tax stack better. We'll talk about some updates. U there's nothing new in the change log from ClickUp officially this week, but that doesn't mean nothing's changed in the platform. So, we're going to bring you into those changes uh specifically in the tool. Uh my name is Greg McKenzie. I'm the founder at Zenpilot. We are ClickUp's uh highest rated solutions partner. their first ever solutions partner. We've served over 3,000 teams since 2018 and we'd love the opportunity to talk with you. So, if you need help streamlining your operations in ClickUp, go to zenpilot.com/call. Book a call. We'd love to talk to you. Okay, let's get into the show. Uh this is episode 10 and ClickUp Weekly presented exclusively by Zenpilot is neither sponsored nor endorsed by ClickUp. So, this show is my fault. Anything you don't like, uh blame it on me. Okay, we're going to start with release notes. We'll talk about what's on the wish list and uh one thing that there was some traction on this week that I think is worth calling out. We'll look at and spend most of our time click up in the wild trivia time and we'll wrap up and I'll get you out of here. First thing, there's nothing officially new in the change log. And I'm actually going to spend almost no time on these, but I would did want to call out just a couple items here. So, baselines um we've got a update this week. It's always ironic when the update comes out and says, "Hey, it's been completed." And the truth is like, oh, it's not quite completed. Um, there's a couple issues with the baselines feature right now. Uh, most of it's working well. Uh, but there's a couple issues with that, but baselines is coming out and I'm going to do a whole episode um where we spend a good chunk of time on baselines in Gant View and how that's helpful. Um, so I'm going to save that one and we're not going to spend a lot of time on that today. The one I wanted to spend a little bit of time on is these time tracking updates. So, we'll pull this up and just see some of the stuff that is um in the in the process. We already talked about some of the things that were already uh released in last week in episode 9. We talked about some of the updates. You have the ability now in ClickUp to take a task, rightclick, and be able to start tracking time, assuming that you have time tracking enabled. It would show up here when you right click on the task itself. Um but in these updates, let's go ahead and pull these up. uh a much simpler if you've ever exported a CSV of time tracking reports and time estimate reports uh wow that's an overwhelming experience the first time you pop that file o open so we'll get a lighter default um in the ability to customize it and add more stuff there PDF exports this one to me not not super useful uh the use case like where I hear this requested is always around um hey I'm working with the client on an hourly basis they want to see how much time we have we've got to attach it to an invoice every something along those lines. And so having a PDF export is uh a really simple way to do that. Uh being able to filter by team. So again, this ClickUp teams feature uh becomes more and more important. Um and grouping tasks and the time reporting card is helpful. Time tracking with AI and agents. This is the one that's going to be most useful. There are probably the most adoption at least among teams who are um paying for ClickUp AI. They pushed some updates out about how they're thinking. In fact, I might even have that tab open about AI billing per user. And there's a quick update here from uh Thursday this week um where they said, "Hey, this is not on the road map. We're not going to do AI billing per user because we're going to a model where it's where it's usage based." And we we've talked about this a couple different times over the past couple months where this is the only way that that this could go eventually. It's it's got to become usage based. And so, um we're seeing that. And I appreciate just a little bit more clarity. I know it's hard. You're walking the line of like we don't know. We're trying to figure it out and everyone's asking, so what do we say? And they're doing the best they can on on uh rolling that out. Um so I think that this is uh I think that this is a really helpful um at least indication from ClickUp about how they're thinking about it and they are going to go down this road. Okay. Um so that one's going to be I think pretty popular. time entry deletion logs and your task history. I I don't like the personal list personally. Like I think there's a better way to build this. I should probably spend an episode just on like household management, personal list. What do we what do we do? And should those things live in the same place? Should they not live in the same place? I've got a lot of thoughts there in terms of what's working well. And I've got like we got a lot of stuff going on personally at this phase of life. Um so I've I've had a good amount of experience here building this out. uh suggesting tasks. This one will be helpful. Um and then you know right click to start a timer or untasks. Uh that one that's what I mentioned um here a second ago. Uh time reporting dashboard in the timehub. This will be helpful as well. So there's a bunch of these things that are all kind of quality of life improvements around time tracking that are coming out and I just want to call those out um as hey some of that stuff actually is starting to roll into the platform and the rest of it is coming over the next couple weeks. Uh we'll do another one on this. at some point, but read only access to click apps for non-admin members so that they understand what's going on. And then not rescheduling closed tasks um specifically when there's a blocker. So if you're heavy into dependencies, um this is going to be useful for you already. Uh both of these are already live but not um not really talked about. I I assume at some point in the change log those will go out and they'll share more info about that. We'll talk more. We've got a whole um another episode coming out around dependencies that'll happen as well. Okay. So, not a ton change log wise, but I wanted to hit that stuff just so you're in the loop on, hey, what's new? I want this to be as quickly as you can digest it. Um without putting in a ton of time, like can somebody just This is what I've wanted for the longest time. It's like, can somebody just summarize this and give it to me? And we've got enough stuff going on at Zen Pilot with enough different people uh touching enough different parts of the app every single day that this stuff all gets aggregated and pushed up and and is super helpful. All right, wish list. I wanted to call this out nested logic in forms and I think I had this Yeah, I do have this pulled up. So, here's an update uh also from Thursday. Um you already have logic in forms which is super helpful. For the longest time, this was a a feature request and we didn't have the ability um to say, "Hey, if they said that they want a t-shirt, then what size is that t-shirt?" would be the logical next question. And I don't need to ask that if they don't want a t-shirt. Um we have that level of logic. What we don't have is nested logic. So, I can't say um you know, if you're in the US, uh then state is the obvious one that should show up. And then if you're in a state like pick a city or or whatever. So I thought that was a good example here from Chris um on the on the ask specifically. So just an FYI that this is uh getting built right now. Um and I think saying this is top priority for us that surprised me because this really is like for a lot of teams this is kind of an edge edge case. Uh it's not that common but when you need it you need it and it is super helpful. I also don't think it's a crazy lift to go build this one. That's such a classic statement for someone who's not responsible for building it and making sure it works on all these different devices, locations, use cases, all that kind of stuff. But, uh, this seems like this is not a not a crazy one to go build. Um, and I wanted to point out if you're in feedback.clickup.com, you're in the cany, um, uh, screen here, make sure you're logged into your ClickUp account and just upvote the stuff that you're interested in. So, like, you know, here's what I do is I just go into uh the road map in some cases or feedback and I'll look for specifically what I'm looking for. Like if I'm going to add, you know, I throw in a decent amount of requests into this and um and so I'll just but I'll just search and say, hey, you know, like nested logic. Let's go find what that's all about. Oh, there it is. And you can see there's some different ones. ClickUp does a pretty good job of merging these together. You'll see, I would imagine, here somewhere, uh, let's see if we can find an example where they'll merge in other posts from other people, um, and pull these together. Look at that. November 14th. You can see some of the the previews of that. But usually they do a good job of, you know, the product managers at ClickUp are doing a good job of going through this and pulling in different posts that people are asking for and bring it together. Well, you can read through that obviously comment on it. But if you upvote, you'll get notified about, hey, what what status changes or updates have happened here. So helpful way to say that type of things uh with very low lift. Okay, that's what on what's on the wish list. I want to spend a little bit of time just talking about um three things here in terms of ClickUp in the wild. Uh the MCP uh I'm using like pretty much all day. Um as I'm working in Claude, I'm working with other tools. Uh I still am using ClickUp AI and Click ClickUp Brain. Um and Brain Max or Brain GPT a good amount. Um but I'm also working inside uh Claude or Chat JPT. Uh those are like the two, you know, most most uh those two are open all day long like getting used all day long. Um, and so the MCP, we had a wish list item last week or the week before, uh, talking about like a couple updates that I'd like to see made there, but the combination of building custom skills and I I don't quite have it at a point where I want to share it, uh, share what we're using internally and what in like my specific version of it. Um, but we'll do an episode here shortly on the way that we're using a ClickUp skill um to help us out like to really dramatically speed up workflow. Um, so anyways, just a reminder like everyone's going to work out of this stuff at some point. You might as well be early. It's not that hard. If you've got questions, I can I I'll put together a how-to like just a quick walkthrough of me setting it up. Um, so Ian, when you see this and you're editing it, make sure that there's a reminder from me to go build that video out. Actually, we'll just take the I'll just pull from the transcript automatically into um ClickUp and have it build out the task for me. Uh, so that's a task that I'll do. Um, but anyways, I just want to call it out like go use it, play with it. It's awesome. You know, your starting timers, you've got your like and and the easiest way to pair it is like in my skills file, I'll give it, hey, here's what my startup routine ought to look like every day. uh that needs to integrate into ClickUp. And for me, like honestly, I built I recorded the um the most or before we have an update that's going out now to the Zenpilot training center, I recorded the Zenpilot ClickUp certification uh in the last version of it. And one of those lessons is just on the startup routine and shutdown routine. So, I took my process that lives in ClickUp. I took the transcript from that video about a lot of the context of why. Um, I brought those together and I used that to help build out like here's exactly what the skill needs to know about the context and why we're doing this. Um, and then I'm able to just use as part of my startup routine every day. There's other sources that need to get pulled into that. So, I've got email and my calendar that's a part of that. Um, and my other messaging platforms um, and that's all kind of rolled into what my startup routine looks like. Uh, I've talked about how we use HubSpot as a CRM before. Um, and so how does HubSpot and ClickUp play together? Like all this is happening kind of in the same place. So I was able to train um Claude on what to do there to coach me through and help me with my startup routine every day uh using the ClickUp MCP and then this uh skill for it. All right, dashboards as views. Um, this one I just want to call out this is kind of like a a ClickUp rewind section. real quickly, you can anywhere in ClickUp, uh let's say you're in a folder or in a specific list or something, um create a new dashboard here. And so we've got the dashboards hub. So if I went here, you can go see the dashboards hub and all the different dashboards that you have built. Uh that's super nice for getting like a big overview, but if you have a big team and it's not filtered down to your specific dashboards, that can get a little bit overwhelming. And so this is another way that you can organize um your dashboards. Obviously each individual um you know we could add a view here to a list and that works totally fine. But there are cases where you might actually want it to show up in the lefth hand hierarchy here what your dashboards are. So just like we've taken templates and here's a list of all our different templates or here's clients and here's the different client projects we have going on. It's possible you'd want to have a space for dashboards. Uh, I wouldn't race to that because you don't want to separate out your dashboards from the underlying data. So, I wouldn't actually build it that way. Um, but you may want to have like a, you know, a dashboard link from the lefth hand uh, sidebar. This is one of those things that to me is not a big deal because I know how to get to what dashboards I want. I'm just going to favorite my my most common dashboards um, or I'm going to understand how they're built. But I've seen this be helpful working with larger teams and teams who are new to the platform to be like, "Hey, how can I get just a quick um you know, I quickly want to add it in there." One thing to note is right now if you have dashboards built, you can't go retroactively add them to a location. So if you think you want to design out your workspace uh with dashboards showing in your lefth hand uh column or tied to specific locations, which which does make sense, you know, you'll pretty much always want uh let's just go to a client overview as an example. um you'll probably want some dashboard here and at a minimum even if it's not a full dashboard uh or or separate dashboard like you'll you'll want some of the the stuff that's involved here. Um but but think through that stuff if you're setting it up especially for a larger team or uh you know you're bringing a lot of folks who are not used to being in a platform like this. Uh that would be a useful tip to uh to know about and to use. And so build that into your blueprint. Like what's the design of ClickUp? Like okay, let's think about this and let's get it built right the first time. If you need help building that blueprint, go to zenpilot.com/bloopprint or book a call with us and uh we can walk you through exactly how to do that. All right, there's a lot there. Let's talk about tech stack management. So I wanted to cover uh this because on LinkedIn, we pull this up. Uh I posted this um and the point of this wasn't even necessarily like uh in ClickUp specifically, but I was just curious like what else are people using to manage text because I see a lot of this happening in like you know a Google sheet somewhere or an Excel file. Um and a lot of this just happens purely out of your financial tools. like it's just I'm going into my software category or when the track transactions come through that's where I know you know what what renewals are coming up or whatever else and I think that's crazy like we are hiring soft just like you hire people to get jobs done we're hiring software to get jobs done I've got you know ClickUp is our most productive software employee um but every software has a specific job in what we're doing HubSpot's an expensive one uh for us and so I I just had pulled this and put it in there. And then Carl commented and like this was a super cool um story. So Carl, thanks for sharing this. Like Techstack Review let us cut nearly $20,000 in annual software spend. And they're using um Carl's been a longtime uh customer and friend and they're using our uh ClickUp solution for techstack management, which is super cool. Um so I thought, hey, this is like it's not rocket science, right? You get all these things hired. You do an annual review with your team members. If you're running on a system like the entrepreneurial operating system or EOS, you do a quarterly review uh with each of your or quarterly conversation with each of your team members as well. Like there should be some some pretty basic principles to how we manage our tech stack. So, I'm going to give you kind of the shortened version of it, but um we could spend a bunch of time on what we're actually doing uh tech stackwise. So we've got a space called records and we've got internal and external records. So examples would be like your team directory or if you're managing out of office requests in this way like you know you put them there. You could have a bunch of different things here. Deliver records you might have clients um contracts that kind of stuff. Uh but we're just going to focus on the tech stack itself. So each of these uh tasks uh in a in a real situation are going to be a custom task type um typically called tools. You might want to call it software or uh something else. But each of these tools then has a series of statuses. Now this is a little bit different than what we used to use. It used to not be set up with these statuses. And I talked about why the time and status click app in ClickUp changes some of the approach to simplifying statuses and makes us get a little bit more complex uh with some statuses in specific use cases. Don't go there everywhere. Like do not race to this for all your client work. But for custom task types, custom statuses will often make sense. And so you can see we can see what's triing, what's active, what's what we're canceling, and what's inactive. And that just gives us some uh easy reporting on like hey how much stuff do we have in each of these statuses. Obviously here we're grouping it by uh status in this case. Um but it's going to give us some timeline as well. So we see what we're canceling, what's currently active, what's triing. Um and inactive is hidden from this. We could we could show that as well. So there is some really basic info in this version. This is kind of an older version and simplified version of the tech stack management in this demo portal, but you've got kind of a tool champion who's assigned um you know, how are we paying for this? Are we paying it for it monthly, annually? Are there variable costs? We've got a cost component so that we can do a summary and see, hey, roughly what's our software spend? You know, okay, we're spending 34 grand on this. Um we're canceling $1,000 a month. That's great. If we added everything that we're triing right now, assuming that we were annualizing the spend, that's what it would what it would look like. Uh, and then what's the primary use that we're using it for? I love having like, hey, here's the login link to go see it. This is so helpful. Uh, there are three main points that this is so helpful to have these records. And you could see here um we could add a bunch of other fields uh to this as well u if we wanted to. But um that's kind of a super simplified version. And obviously you can then take that same underlying data and do it however you want to view it. You could put uh you know a dashboard right here so that you can see what are we spending it on, what team you know if this is tied to a primary team, what teams are spending the most on software, all that kind of stuff. Um the three times that having your tech stack managed in one central database and location um one is when somebody's onboarding you get in and all of a sudden you get invited to 15 different tools and um and it's just hard to know like what is this for? I don't understand what this is for and you know why do we have uh Loom if we've got ClickUp already and so we could use ClickUp clips. Well, we're using Loom because of you know X and Y feature. Well, we can put all that information in here. You know, wait, we could do one-on- ones here, but what are we actually using 155 for? Like, we can outline all of that in the tool itself. So, it's super helpful when somebody's onboarding. The other person it's helpful for when you're doing onboarding is it is super helpful for your admin who's got to do the invites because they can go in and build relationships between each of these. Now, I don't have them set up in here, but what we would have normally is we would have this um related to the team directory. And so, let's just see. I don't know who's in the team directory. Let's see if I'm in in the team directory. Um, but we we'd have it related to, hey, who would be in this? Um, and so, you know, I could say, oh, there's a relationship here. That then becomes super important when we get to the second use case, which is somebody's offboarding. and I need to just pull up that person and I could see a quick relationship to all the different tools they have access to. And now it's so easy to go through and say, "Hey, did I remove access from all the things I needed to remove access to during offboarding?" Super, super helpful, right? And then the third time is someone switches roles and you go from, hey, I was doing client services, now I'm moving it into an internal marketing role or I was in this role, now I'm moving into that role. And that requires a different tool set. And so I'm able to quickly go and uh and see that. Um here you can see like this custom icon for the custom task type you know this is a tool. So anyways I just want to share that overview of um the tech stack. I'll give you one other pro tip here. when you're doing onboarding, you're bringing somebody into the new uh in when you're doing onboarding and you're bringing somebody into your workplace for the first time and you've got 20 different tools that you use in the day-to-day, that is so overwhelming and there could be so much time wasted in the first day, in the first week of somebody being on the job where they're just logging in and setting up accounts and they don't know the right way to set it up. So, you can see I've got these favorites set up and I've got a color scheme set up and I've got access to all these different things. I get these views set up and I know how to pin things or favorite things to the bottom of my screen here. Um, well, they don't know how to do any of that on day one unless they're coming from somewhere where they where they were using the tool. So, I love to create account accounts for people joining the team ahead of time. Log in ourselves first and go customize it. So, you walk in on day one and you already have favorites set up, your time zone's already set correctly, your preferences are right, like everything there that we're going to train you on is already set that way. So you don't have to try to figure it out and it looks different than what you're being trained on because you're being trained on a customized environment. So I love doing that as part of onboarding. Um same thing in Google Workspace as a dumb example or any of these tools. Um you know you could already have your calendar set up. You could already have be invited and already have accepted you know your core meetings that you have to jump into. your signature and your email is already set up and HubSpot your your Google Workspace and your HubSpot are already synced together. It's already synced into ClickUp. Um, so you're just kind of hitting the ground running and we've been able to dramatically decrease how much time it takes to on board people by doing the setup that way. And then obviously they get in, they can change the password and they ought to um do that. So make this part of your experience from a security perspective. Um, but you know, now you've got somebody up and running in a couple hours instead of a week or two. Um, so that's just one pro tip that I would give you in terms of how can we make onboarding work smoother. That's the easiest way to get people up and running. And then you don't have to try to dumb down your training to say, well, if you're looking at a blank environment, here's what I would think about doing. You can just say, here's the environment that you're in. We know exactly what your ad experience is going to look like, and now our training can all be packaged up for that. Okay, I'm excited about this kind of stuff. So, that's ClickUp in the wild. Let's go to ClickUp Weekly trivia time. Last week's trivia, what company did ClickUp acquire in April of 2022 to improve their unified search capabilities? Does anyone know the answer right off the top of their head? Slack Dash, Slap Dash, Certify, Quickfind. If you said B, Slap Dash, uh, you're correct. And that was a, um, a cool acquisition and a C from ClickUp and an early one for them, frankly. All right, I've got one question for you this week in ClickUp weekly trivia time. This week's trivia. In what year did ClickUp air its first Super Bowl ad? Was it 2020? What a fun year, right? 2021, 22, 23. Drop a comment here on YouTube. Let me know what year. Uh, and we'll shout out the winners next week. I'll shoot you a note uh directly. All right, that is it for trivia time. As always, uh, get involved here. Subscribe to the show on YouTube, email show@zenpilot.com if you'd like to, uh, be involved and subscribe to our first class operations, which is our bi-weekly newsletter that is designed to help you become a sharper operator. You can go to zenpilot.com/newsletter. Thanks for spending time with me and I will see you next week for another episode of ClickUp Weekly.