An inside look into the app that brought an incredible level of organization to both my personal and professional life this year.

Looking back at the year, one app that totally transformed my personal and professional life is ClickUp.

Earlier in the year, I transitioned away from TickTick. The first few weeks of the transition were painful, however, since then, it’s been smooth sailing.

ClickUp brought an unparalleled organization to my life. It helped me a ton in achieving most of my 2022 goals.

Let me walk you through some of ClickUp’s most unique features that have helped me create a personalized productivity system.

Tasks are First-class Citizens

There are lots of apps out there putting on a facade of a task manager.

If you need to tweak your system to turn it into a task manager, you are doing something wrong.

Task managers are meant to be simply designed apps with tasks as first-class citizens. ClickUp does exactly that.

Above all, in ClickUp, tasks are everything. You get to add a ton of details to every task. Some notable ones include:

• Tags
• Description
• Documents
• Subtasks
• Checklists
• Relationships
• File Attachments

You can do all these and more with every task!

That means you can easily create dependencies in ClickUp. This feature is almost unique to the app. There are other apps that allow task dependencies, but none as seamlessly as ClickUp.

Depending on your style, you can either keep a flat hierarchy where each task is its own thing. Alternatively, you can have a hierarchical structure like this:

• Project → Task 1 → Multiple subtasks
• Yearly Goal → Quarterly Goal → Individual Task → Subtasks

This level of granularity is not very common. Take full advantage of it if you are creating your productivity system using ClickUp.

Calendar View

TickTick was one of the first apps to implement a calendar view within a task manager.

I fell in love with the feature! That was one of the main reasons I stuck with TickTick for so long.

Today, many apps across the productivity industry have a calendar feature embedded within the app. It lets you do the following:

• See all your tasks on the calendar
• Pulls events from other calendars into your task manager
• Lets you pull unscheduled tasks into the calendar
• Your meetings and tasks coexist in the same view

ClickUp does this seamlessly.

You can customize your calendar views to display tasks from certain lists only, with certain priorities, and with certain statuses.

You can also optionally include events from numerous other calendars, and turn them on/off at will.

Personally, I use ClickUp’s calendar feature for the following reasons:

1. Content Calendar for YouTube and Medium
2. Plan my week by dragging unscheduled tasks into different days
3. Weekly view of all tasks and other commitments

Landing Page with Tasks, Calendar & Agenda

ClickUp has one of the best landing pages I have ever seen in a productivity app.

It gives you the full picture of what you have going on. Some key sections to call out here:

• LineUp → Lets you manually add 3 of your most important tasks for the day
• Trending → Shows your most accessed tasks
• Today → Your tasks today with any custom sort you want
• Overdue → Overdue tasks
• Unscheduled → Tasks without any due date

Apart from all your tasks, you get two other helpful views:

1. Calendar → All your calendar events — meetings and tasks
2. Agenda → All your events/tasks for the day sorted by time of day

The complete view really helps you understand how to plan your day and allocate your energy to different tasks.

Easy to Manage Projects

Most task managers in the market will let you do the basics — manage grocery lists, remember birthdays, handle a few reminders, and remind you of your appointments.

However, only a few can evolve with your ever-changing life.

As I became more and more invested in my professional career, the breadth and scope of every project increased.

I found it increasingly difficult to manage complex projects and their dependencies on TickTick. That’s when I decided to use an actual project manager.

ClickUp is a project manager; not merely a task manager.

If you have complex projects in your life, ClickUp will do a great job for you. For the more mundane and day-to-day tasks, you can use Apple Reminders, Google Tasks, TickTick, or Todoist.

When these tasks evolve into projects, that’s when you see the power of an app like ClickUp. That was definitely the case for me this year.

Dashboards Pull in Tasks from Everywhere

One of the biggest hidden powers of ClickUp is this: ClickUp Dashboards.

It’s absolutely brilliant!

It lets you pull in tasks from different “spaces” and “lists”. You can get a consolidated view of everything happening in your life.

Without talking in hypotheticals, let me tell you some dashboards I have on ClickUp and how I use them:

1. Life Progress Dashboard

• In progress yearly goals
• In progress quarterly goals
• Pie chart showing the proportion of completed/unfinished yearly goals
• Pie chart showing the proportion of completed/unfinished quarterly goals
• Number of content published this year
• Number of content that I am currently working on
• Urgent tasks coming up in the next 14 days

2. Reflections

• What did I do this quarter? (List of completed quarterly goals)
• What did I do this year so far? (List of completed yearly goals)
• What did I work on the last 7 days?
• My last 30-day performance in terms of sprint velocity

3. Day Job Rollups

• Standup Updates — what did I work on yesterday? What will I work on today?
• What did I do the last 7 days at work?
• Important work tasks coming up in the next 7 days

All these dashboards are heavily customized and full of data visualizations. You can pick from one of these (and more):

• Lists
• Line Graphs
• Aggregates / Sums
• Pie Charts
• … and many more

You can make them as complex as you need them to be.

ClickUp dashboards are very powerful!

I hope you found this a valuable read and have some takeaways that you can go ahead and implement in your wonderful lives.

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