How Clickup made me at least 100% more efficient

Summary

• Clickup is a project managment tool with a valuation of $1bn+ that is rapidly becoming popular in companies of all sizes.
• I began using Clickup a little over a year ago and it’s organizational power has taken me by storm.. turning me into a devout user.
• It allows you to manage teams with a degree of control that wasn’t possible before… and with relatively small effort.
• This transparency it provides allows you to see very clearly the output of each team member (or lack of output, I might also add)
• If used properly, the history of any decision in a project is easily found. Bringing accountability to a new level.
• Allocating time forces to tasks forces a discipline to prioritisation and efficiency that was never before possible
• In a way it is similar to the McKinsey restructuring methodology that I had used on a consulting project back in 2004.

Context

I first used Clickup in January 2021 in Branded (an FBA acquirer that I was contracting for). At first, I was skeptical as I was already a fairly organized person. But it has taken me by storm and i’m now a devout follower after using it in 3 different companies i’ve consulted for. And some of you are probably thinking… well i use Asana, or Trello, or one of those.. and trust me i’ve used all those before, even recently. And compared to Clickup… they are simply garbage.

How it gives control with little effort

I’ve used Clickup with 30+ contractors and generally like using the board view. I set things up as a Kanban and ensure that the following rules are generally upheld:

• Every task has a ‘context’ and ‘goal’ written in simple English
• Every task has a single assignee and an eta who is responsible for ensuring that the eta is maintained and that the status is correct.
• Tasks are worked on in priority as a kanban, and have a status for ‘review’ which only I can move to ‘done’, ie. i have oversight & approval over all work.

This gives you the gist.. but there are other elements to my process that help ensure it is very clear and organised.

Now at one point in mid-2021 I probably had around 20 or so contractors that I managed directly using this system. Now imagine trying to have 20 direct reports… completely impossible right?

But using this system in clickup, you can not only do it.. but you can have tighter control and transparency into what they do than if you had just 7 reports.

Because you know exactly when they start a task, they comment when they’re stuck, you know when they finish, etc.

Ultimate transparency

Since everyone in your team is working on these tasks, which you are following through notifications (kind of like how you follow a post in Facebook), you see all of the updates on all cards. Meaning that you know what tasks have finished, where people got stuck, what tasks are late, etc.

I clear my clickup notifications (screenshot above) 2x per day usually… and can easily review/comment on 200+ notifications in a day on various tasks. No more slack messages asking people how they’re doing.. no more asking people for an eta… it’s all right there. And the system requires everyone maintain tight discipline to it.

And given that it is a visual interface that I am taking action on, my brain actually has an amazing and far better ability to retain all these bits of information than if i’d had verbal updates.

The other thing its extremely transparent about is how little some people do. You have dashboards that show exactly what tasks people were assigned and which ones they completed. Plus i often used story points with a target weekly velocity per person. No more hiding. No more taking credit for others’ work. Yes, of course this has been used for scrum by engineers for years… but typically not deployed for the non-engineering tasks I was using it for.

Accountability… period.

With this system you also have complete transparency into who took certain decisions and why. You just go find the relevant clickup card and see…. who did it. And therefore you no longer have these team calls where you ask…”so who made xyz mistake?” and sit there as everyone remains in silence. You just dig up the card, read thru the history of comments, and voila!! It’s all there in black and white.

Allocating time to tasks started as an experiment… but the exercise uncovered a powerful finding

So as you can see i was already a huge fan of Clickup.. but then more recently i was creating orders on Fiverr for contractors for blocks of time (eg. 10hrs) and asking them to use the time allocation feature on clickup tasks. So basically I would prioritise some tasks for them in clickup and they would need to allocate the time they spent to them. Additionally, I told them that they needed to account for all of their time in the order on Fiverr (eg. 10 hrs) with the clickup tasks that the time was used for. Otherwise I wouldn’t accept delivery of the Fiverr order, and they wouldn’t get paid.

Now a few very interesting things happened when I did this:

• They were laser focused on just these tasks and tried to steer away from any general meetings that they couldn’t allocate to a task
• I immediately saw when we spent too much time on low value tasks, and thus we learned from it.
• The inefficiency of certain contractors became clear.. as it was too much time spent on the tasks they were doing. And they themselves, began to self-correct.
• In general, our overall efficiency improved radically. Because now all contractors knew they had to bill all of their time to get paid and there was nowhere to ‘hide’ time

And what it reminded me of was an MBA internship project that I did in 2004 for the company Bookspan

So in 2004 I did a summer internship project for the book clubs business of Bertelsmann called Bookspan. They were based not far from my house in Long Island and the business was similar to the music club models like BMG where you subscribed and needed to order a certain number of books over the course of the year. The business was in rapid decline because of the likes of Amazon and so an ex-McKinsey director was brought into lead a ‘restructuring’ of the company. And I was one of the members of his team.

We used a popular Mckinsey methodology that I’m forgetting the name of but has been used by them in probably hundreds of projects. Basically we would come up with a list of services that every department in the company provided, and then each person in the department would need to allocate 100% of their time to the project. So I literally spent my summer going around departments asking people what they did & to allocate their time to it…. kind of like the comedy show ‘Office Space’.

We could then apply their salary and any other costs to figure out the total cost of that service to the company. By knowing the overall cost of all services in the company, you could therefore conclude which were too expensive for the value they provided. And of course when you get rid of the service, you get rid of the people associated to the service, ie. the ‘restructuring’ part of it. I believe during that single project we recommended reducing the overall headcount of the company by at least 15%, but the cuts came in waves even 1–2 years later. Yes, it was a bit sad but it taught me the power of forcing people to allocate their full time to a set of prioritised services.

Everything needs to get allocated somewhere.. and if you were inefficient, certain services are gonna look fat. Because you cannot hide time anywhere.

And so now for the conclusions from these experiences…

• I believe that teams & entire organisations can easily see 100%+efficiency gains by systematising something like Clickup, as I have.
• I would go as far as saying that I think all good organizations of the future will be using something like Clickup as the ‘process operating system’ of their company. And it will thereby play a much more important role than ERP’s.
• In my experience, the people that come up with excuses for not using clickup are often the ones who are disorganized. Highly organised people, regardless of how busy they are, will realize that it pays back the time you invest in it very quickly.
• I’ve probably managed as many direct reports and concurrent tasks as 99% of the people reading this.. and yet I was never too ‘busy’ to do this properly. Note that i’ve had responsibility for 50+ and 100+ people at various points in my career. Am i saying the CEO of a large organization needs to be using all these techniques? No… but actually if i was running a very large org (eg. 10,000+ people), i’d still probably be using some of them. Because it keeps people accountable and you do not ‘forget’ what you asked for.
• Time allocation is the true frontier in terms of getting teams to be extremely focused and efficient. But does need to be used carefully, ie. I’m not saying to use it with every team and in every circumstance.