If you've used ClickUp AI and played with ClickUp automations, you know how insanely powerful they are. But getting them configured correctly, that's the hard work. And so, if you're watching this, there's a good chance that you have already done some work with it and you're excited about the possibility, but you've not unlocked everything that you know is possible. So, I want to talk through today specifically how to use automations in conjunction with custom fields to speed up your planning and project management process. My name is Greg McKenzie. I'm the founder at Zenpilot. I'm the host of ClickUp Weekly. This is episode 11. Welcome to ClickUp Weekly. Let's go ahead and dive in. We have a great show for you today. We're going to talk about that, but we're going to talk about a bunch of other stuff on the show as well. As a reminder, ClickUp Weekly is presented exclusively by Zenpilot and is neither sponsored nor endorsed by ClickUp. Today, we're going to cover ClickUp's release notes from this week. We'll go through the ClickUp Rewind where we talk more about automations and custom fields. Uh we'll dig into the wish list, ClickUp in the wild, and of course, we'll end with trivia time. All right. And if we go into ClickUp here, you can see I've got 24 minutes to get this recorded. So, I promise you this video is going to be under 24 minutes. Okay, first things to note. ClickUp release notes. Nothing new in the change log that ClickUp put out this week. That doesn't mean that they didn't do anything. However, we asked for this a couple weeks ago on ClickUp weekly. We said, "Hey, this was the one that we spotlighted was I want through the ClickUp MCP and I'm using ClickUp through Cloud Code every single day in my workflow. So, I'm using the MCP feature super super heavily and there are some things that you're limited to via MCP that you could do natively in the app. Obviously, one of those things was you weren't able to add tasks to additional lists and we gave the example of, hey, I might be working on something with my team, but because clients have visibility to it, they also that lives in another list that a client has access to. So, they're able to see the information that we've shared uh there in those views but not in the original location. So, this would be super nice to be able to add things after they've been created to additional lists. Now, you can move tasks. That's a separate feature and add tasks to additional lists through the MCP. So, big shout out to the ClickUp team. Thank you for bringing that to us this week. Okay, there are a couple other minor things. There's a bunch of exciting stuff in staging. That's stuff I'm not supposed to talk about yet, but this one is terrific. Let's go to the ClickUp Rewind. And this is what I want to talk about and and this is where we'll spend the bulk of the time today. I just want to do some quick teaching on um custom fields and automation. So, you've got AI, ClickUp AI, and you've got automations in there for two separate purposes in the app. So, we've got AI, and I can ask any question that I want to, you know, tell me what Alex has gotten done this week that's been most impressive. And let me be honest with you, I'm never typing this stuff anymore. I'm terrible at typing anyways. So, I'm just getting dictated. I'm using Super Whisperer. And look at that. I turned it on and I'm going to paste it in here. and it paste in. But I'm just going to say, let's maybe zoom out. Uh, do we have any new overdue tasks from this past week across our clients? And, you know, we paste it and we'd ask whatever. Well, AI is interpreting what it thinks we meant by the question and then it's taking what it perceives as our intention and it's going to give us an answer based on that. Super cool. Automations work a little bit differently. Automations are extremely literal. Automations are more like when you search and you search with quotation marks and so we might be searching like overdue tasks and it's just going to find that specific set of information and um and share that with us. So automations are extremely literal like if this happens then that happens and I let me give you an example here. So the use case that I want to present to you so stick with me here for just a second. We have a ton of work that needs done right we've got an example deliverable here. We're running this big campaign on the world's best boss and we've got all these things that need to happen. You know, we're going to create a strategy. We're going to interview the client. We're going to write it. We're going to prove it. We have all these things that need to happen. Well, each of these specific tasks have a role that was assigned to it when we built a template for all of this work because we didn't build this all just for Trader Joe's. We built this for the work that we're going to do across all clients. And that way when we deploy it and we say, "Hey, I want to use this template for Trader Joe's." It comes in, we already know the role. It makes it really easy to assign the work. but we didn't preset it at the template level to be assigned to somebody because we've got a bunch of people on the team and so you might have a different copywriter or a different editor or a different strategist somewhere. Then we have a custom view here. So you can see tasks by role and instead of grouping it over here in a way that makes sense which is by due date and where we're expanding it. We're able to see it all grouped by deliverable here. I don't care about that. I just want to see show me all the tasks completely separated out by the role. senior senior strategist or strategist or account manager has this copywriter has this or designer has this you know so on and so forth and I can even see what what didn't get something well let's go back to the senior strategist one what this role is helpful for then is I can take and I can just bulk select and I can assign let's assume that this all came out of the template and the assignees were empty on this I could just bulk assign this to whoever I need to assign it to in this case it's already assigned to me so it's not a huge deal to go through but there are there are massive templates and projects we work with clients every week and enterprise teams So, you know, like there's 40 different people touching a project or 40 different roles touching a project. And so, this is just a little bit tedious to go in and build, especially in a high volume situation, either on a project or a client basis where, hey, we're just doing a ton of work for this client. So, that's where automations come in. I kind of gave you a quick overview there of like why this role custom field would be helpful. Automations playing into this are going to allow us to set the assigne based on the role value for that specific project or client super easily. So what we're going to do is we're going to go up to the client level here. Click automations. And you can see we already have a automation here. So this is anytime a task or subtask gets created however it gets created in this specific location for this client because these automations are, you know, location specific. We're going to set a custom field and we're going to set a client value. Tasks are always going to have a property tied to them that says the client is Trader Joe's and a client grouping. So in this case, it's kind of like, hey, our account manager for this or our project lead is Jeff. And now this is obviously going to power a view that's going to allow me from a visibility perspective to go see all the projects that Jeff is handling. I want to see stats, info, progress on everything that he has going on. So show me overdy tasks across all the clients or show me everything that didn't get any time tracking data associated to it. Show me everything where the client has rejected or we're waiting on a client approval in across Jeff's clients or for this specific client, you know, show me how much time we have tracked versus estimated. Like all that stuff becomes super easy to pull in. But what I want to do is I want to build an automation that says, hey, anytime a task gets pulled in and it's for a senior strategist, Jeff's the senior strategist on this account. So any new tasks that get created from a template or however they get created, automatically assign any tasks that are for the senior strategist to Jeff. And so I'm just going to show you, we'll just walk through real quickly what that looks like and you can figure out how that would apply beyond that. So in this case, I'm going to take any task or subtask that gets created here, but we're going to add a filter and instead of the assigne, we're going to pick a custom field and we're going to say that the custom field of ro is equal to that senior strategist. Then over here in the action, so that's the if this is all the if then what happens? So if then you know here we're going to change the assignees and we're going to say hey in this case these were Jeff's clients you know we'd select Jeff for select you know whoever the right user is for that and then we always want to name these automations so give us a clear you know assign gray to senior strategist tasks right create it and now that's on you can toggle these on and off you can manage these through your automation manager like a It's really pretty slick. I'll turn that one off for now. Does that use case make sense? I wanted to walk through that and uh and just give you an idea of like, hey, these automations are so helpful. There's so many things you can do. In fact, let's just um let's do the same thing. We're just going to go here. But we can have multiple automations. And if you've not played in this, especially recently, the amount of stuff we can do internally, stuff we can do externally. Hey, Google calendar. I want to create event or delete a calendar event. So that you know example would be like um I'm going through my list of meetings in the morning and are there meetings that are no longer necessary? Check the box that says meeting like no not needed and it deletes the calendar event for it. Like there's a million things that you could probably think of of how this can work. Apply a template whenever I say hey this is actually a blog post piece of content. So in a content calendar situation this is a blog post. will apply the blog post template then automatically uh this is a video. I just decided to make this a video and a podcast. So, uh I need both templates pulled in two different tasks. Like we could build all of that here. So, there is so much stuff that we can do. There's all kinds of filters. One of these ones that we highlighted in one of the very earliest episodes of ClickUp Weekly was task name contains. Hey, if this contains blog post, I don't even need somebody to press the right thing. I just need to know all it contains is blog. then apply the template. Grab the template here and we're going to pull the blog post template. Then I don't know if we have one in here. How do we do? What do you know? You know, apply the blog post template uh to that. And I also want you to leave a comment. I guess I should say comment. So it's not leave uh comment and say at, you know, gray in this case. um or at the assenee or at whoever created this or whoever triggered this uh hey you know dot dot dot do whatever pretty crazy right there's so many different things that that you can do out of automation so I just wanted to call that to your attention make sure you're aware of that if you need help designing like this is a huge part of our blueprint process that we're taking clients through is hey what are the opportunities where there's just all these all these points in the process that eat up a little bit of time here a little bit of time here a little bit of time here and AI is the big buzz word and AI totally like we could the alternative approach to this is to create a super agent that says hey look at this look at everything that has this custom field automatically assign it based on the people who we've said let's go in this case let's go to uh well we can go all over the place we'll go to records and we're going to go to external or delivery records and we'll say clients new client comes on board and let's see if these have any uh we don't have any roles I bet we do unengagements though in here. So, we might have some roles associated to this. Uh let's see, we'll just pull up one of these. We've got like sales lead, but imagine we had um you know, senior strategist was another account here. We had some of those things listed here. Well, we could say, hey, anytime they come in, match up the name that we put on here or, you know, we sometimes use a code. Um, so match those up to any work in here and assign the right people. That is fine as well. And there are times where that totally makes sense. What you want to keep in mind is like if there's things that you know deterministically are just going to run over and over and over, you are it's so much more efficient to run those from a budget perspective and uh like energy usage of perspective. It's so much less expensive to run those through automations than it is to run those through super agents. So, just keep that stuff in mind. Like, this can have a huge impact. It may take you an hour or two to go build something out, probably a lot quicker if you're working with us and we've got recipes, but it may take a little bit to to go build it out. And you may make all that money back in the first couple months of running it through automations instead of AI. So, it's it's worth just just paying attention to those things and and knowing where they are. All right, you like this content, subscribe here on YouTube. But if you got questions about this or other applications for automations that you absolutely love, would you leave a comment here on YouTube? Let me know. And it'd be helpful for everyone else who's watching as well. We are trying to build a community of people who are sharing, learning, giving, trading, um, developing, and so it'd be super helpful to get your thoughts and and share with the world. Uh, wish list. I did not highlight anything this week just because limited time, but what do you want to see in ClickUp? There you go. We got an empty bullet point, so you fill in the blank for us. Leave a comment. Uh, ClickUp in the wild. There's a bunch of stuff. So, I just wanted to flag this and mention this because we've got uh Zeb draws some great comparisons or analogies. So, Zeb's talking about how humans are like the big moat and draws these great parallels back to the web design industry. Uh, and some and you know there's there's a bunch that you could draw on. Let's see. So, this is kind of what I mean by the example. Uh, everyone's talking about vibe coding replacing engineers. It's ridiculous. We've seen this already before, right? With websites. We had website builders for decades, Squarespace, Wix, and WordPress, you know, and then keeps going in this and say, "Hey, even though all those tools existed, pretty much everyone still hired other people." Why? Because if you're brand new and you go to Wix or you go to Squarespace or WordPress, and you, you know, you grab a theme, you put up a site that looks like the rest of the sites, you forgot to, you know, index your site for SEO, like you just, there's there's stuff that people just mess up and don't have time for. And the reality is division of labor is really good from an economic perspective. So I I think that in the same way is what Zeb is saying here like you want people who are great at AI for specific use cases just like you wanted people who are great you became really good at different things online like pretty much everybody became good at email and search you know to a to a degree. Are there people who are better emailers and better at searching than other people? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not denying that. But in the same way like we then we all fell into these little you know um niche skills where someone was really good at design and someone was really good at spreadsheets and someone was good at coding and Python and someone was good at front end development and backend development and we're going to have the same type of specialties online and really what we want is just like you know the base level stuff got way easier. So writing emails, even typing early on, like that was a skill set that not everybody had. Then everybody developed that skill and so your career as a typist goes away. But there's plenty of other opportunities. And so I think this is like a good parallel to draw is websites over to um into what we're doing now as like as a very small picture and idea. You know, this is like the pattern that we're continuing to see. This one is larger than website builders for sure. Clearly, I think larger than it's hard to say it's larger than the internet because the internet was so massive and already has had such a huge impact on people's lives, but I think that the time compression around AI so far is pretty crazy. So, I think the rate of change may be the largest. Anyways, thought that was worth calling out. We'll get rid of these MCP ones. Jason Freed had talked about Jason puts out like always kind of a thought-provoking content around it. And so I thought that there were a couple good things here uh that Jason was sharing around like, hey, bespoke software. Does this really make sense? Does everyone really want their own custom tools? And Jason is saying like we we I feel like the consensus right now is and this could be my bubble, but I feel like the consensus is um no, there's going to be a world for big converge tools. And you know, this is what Zeb has been going in on talking about convergence. Uh, and ClickUp is is leaning hard into this convergence. Hey, we got to bring these tools together for people. And so, I've got that happening on one side of like what I'm seeing, reading, experiencing, which is, yeah, I want tools that make this all super simple and simplified. And then the other side, I just see so many cool applications of, you know, bespoke software. I've got a bunch of them already running. Like, I do this ear training for music through an app that I built that is just like, hey, play a note, play a chord, give me a quiz, gamify it. uh make sure that I'm spending 10 minutes every day trying to improve my ear and saying, "Oh yeah, that's a, you know, B7th and is it an augmented or a diminish chord?" So anyways, I like that is super helpful for me that's not rolled into something else. So there is a world for both of those and I think both things are kind of true to some degree at the same time. Anyways, we can get lost there uh talking about all of that and Zeb kind of leans into this a little bit more. He's big on this like, hey, horizontal software is the way forward. I don't see it the same way. Um I think big big scale stuff then I think I probably do see it similarly but I think there's all kinds of like point software uh very niche use case stuff that I'm so excited about uh what's happening right now. All right there's a lot more happening on Reddit. Um some good threads there around like hey we want to love ClickUp you know let's let's figure out how to make some of the performance and rollouts and stuff better. And seeing ClickUp's leadership jump in on that was cool to see. And also like people pointing out, hey, there's some accurate challenges and issues. And in a world where all the software is getting better, this is what's so exciting to me is like notion's putting out super exciting stuff right now. HSA is rolling stuff out faster than they have historically. Monday's making strides. You've got all these improvements happening in different software. I was just in our um we uh run on EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system, and we were having our L10, our level 10 weekly meeting with the leadership team this morning, and we use this tool called success. And I've I've posted before about success.co and how we use it in conjunction with ClickUp, and the the integration is incredible there. And they've got all these new AI features in the in the tool that are like really really neat. So, we'll give Peter and the and uh the team there a big shout out for the work that they're doing, just implementing so quickly. Uh but it is a really exciting time in the space and that's exciting to me to be like hey expectations for everybody are getting ratcheted up and that leads to better software better outcomes ultimately across the board which is exciting. That brings us to ClickUp weekly trivia time. Last week's trivia question in what year did ClickUp air their first Super Bowl ad? Was it 202122 or 23? And if you knew that the answer was 2022, and if you know the story behind that ad, it's pretty crazy how it kind of came about uh last minute and ClickUp was able to get in uh less expensively thanks to some inventory that popped up at a discounted rate. Uh so 2022 is the correct answer. Give yourself a pat on the back if you answered 2022 for ClickUp's first Super Bowl ad. And don't hold your breath for uh one coming up at the World Baseball Classic because the World Baseball Classic just ended. Uh okay, this week's trivia. ClickUp AI launched in February of 2023, rebranded to what name in early 2024 was it? ClickUp Mind, ClickUp Brain, ClickUp Intelligence, ClickUp Assist. If you've been paying attention to ClickUp Weekly, this is a one out of 10. This is a layup. So, if you don't know, log into ClickUp and figure it out. I thought that was a just a funny one uh to end on here today. All right, will you get involved with the show? Subscribe on YouTube. Share it with your friends. Email show at zenpilot.com if you've got questions or want to participate in a future episode and subscribe to firstclass operations@zenpilot.comnewsletter. As always, thanks for being here. Appreciate your time. Go rock it and click up world and we'll see you next