In this video, I'm going to explain the ClickUp hierarchy using some analogies and hopefully these analogies are going to help the ClickUpto-do hierarchy make sense to someone who has never used a task management system before and is used to using physical pieces of paper to keep track of their to do list. And honestly, if you're using Excel, if you're using your email inbox, if you're using sticky notes, this is for you guys. Right. This is going to be explaining the ClickUp hierarchy for someone who has no familiarity with it so far. So to begin our analogy, I would like to start with a piece of paper. OK, this is a list, right? This is our list where we would put our to-dos. And if you were keeping physical notes, you might have something like this going on where you have task task that may be a subtask if there's like little pieces that go into the big task. So task one might be go get the mail task two might be clean the house and our subtask could be each room of the house I need to clean. This isn't remarkable, right? This is a pretty simple concept. But when you have a lot of lists and you need to share them with a lot of people and you've got a bunch of different projects going on at once, having a bunch of pieces of paper like this might not be so sustainable. So when you have a lot of pieces of paper, you naturally want to put them in a container and that's where the folder comes into play. So by adding our To-Do list into different folders, we can take this folder with us when we're going to work, take a folder with us, if we're that type of person to the grocery store, we can take this folder with us whenever we need to and keep track of all of the different to do lists we have in our life. Now, some of us, we're not just keeping track of to-dosto-do for ourselves or for our family. We're keeping track of to-dos for organization. And if you picture a company of 20 or 50 or 500, you can imagine that one folder of organization is going to become really cluttered. You're going to need to bring this giant folder with you to every team meeting, and that's not sustainable. So that's why you might use two folders, because you want to bring one with you when you're at home. You want to have another folder when you're at work. Maybe you want another folder just for that really big web design project that you're working on with your team. You have a folder for kind of the grouping of to do list that you need to keep track of naturally by having a physical folder. Your permissions, who's able to see that folder is really clear. Whoever has the folder or will have access to the folder can see what's in the folder. Now, obviously, there's some downsides of this, right? I don't need to explain why physical documents can be difficult. They're hard to back up. They're hard to share if someone's not in the same room as you. And for that reason, digital tools have kind of taken the same exact structure and applied it into the digital universe. So remember this structure of having multiple folders, to-do lists and tasks on those lists for what I'm about to show you here. So let's dove into ClickUp. So here we are inside a project management or task management tool called ClickUp. Now, ultimately, at the most basic level, ClickUp functions the same way as those folders, but it can also do more. We're going to focus on the basic way first inside the very center of ClickUp are our tasks. And this isn't that radical, right? This is exactly like having a to do list on a piece of paper. We could also using this little button here, create subtasks. So let's just actually let's use exact same example I said before, clean house and we want to create a subtask clicking this button here for each room of the house. Let's do kitchen, bathroom and living room. I think at first glance this is pretty understandable by anyone who does a paper checklist. Right. Let's just hide this little sidebar. Let me just hide all of this other stuff. And when we do that, this is pretty reasonable, right? Anyone could kind of understand, OK, when I do this, I'm going to check things off and they go away because they're done. So these are tasks in ClickUp. Now ClickUp just like you having your tasks, sometimes it makes sense to have things on a list. Now ClickUp it always is on a list. But for you, maybe sometimes you have tasks on a sticky note, but ultimately you want to have them on one piece of paper so you can see all of the tasks in one place. Well, ClickUp requires that with the application of what they call lists. So ClickUp uses lists to organize things in that same exact way. Lists in ClickUp are actually found right here. So they look a lot like tasks, but they're on the left sidebar. They're about as low as you can go on that sidebar. And lists can have colors if you choose to give them. And these lists can have names. They get a bunch of other settings as well. But let's just focus on the name. My list is called List, but we could call this something else. Maybe we'll call this new website. So that's our list. And inside the list, we have tasks exactly the same way we could choose to make some of these subtasks just like we did before by typing them or clicking and dragging. But that's ultimately all we have here. We have lists and to dos on them to do list. Now, obviously, there's a few more things going on here. Let's suspend the disbelief and let's focus on the simplicity first. Now, just like when we have physical notes, sometimes these lists can be quite a lot like if I duplicate this a bunch more times, I'm going to create a few copies of this list. Basically, you can see how it eventually it is going to become pretty cluttered here as we have a lot of projects, a lot of balls in the air. So that's where folders come in, folders in ClickUp, just like folders in real life, really have no data attached to them. These folders are just a container for us to put lists inside. So if I collapse this folder and expand this folder, all this folder is doing is grouping our lists. There are no tasks that live here, nothing else, just a container, just like our own folders here. We might end up having a lot of folders and sometimes especially once you have five, 10, 15 folders, you might feel a little bit overwhelmed seeing all of them at once. And that's why ClickUp has one more container higher in the hierarchy that we can use to organize ourselves. And that is a space. Now, a space if we're going to try to think of the physical comparison, I would say is probably the most like a filing cabinet or filing drawer. We can have a bunch of folders in it or we can just have loose pieces of paper. So maybe this is a list, right? Let's just move this list to just be floating. It's not in any of the folders. It's just floating on its own, just like your physical filing cabinet. Rename this just for clarity, but there we go. So now we have a filing cabinet, which is a space called Space, Home Tasks, folder, job one, job two list. But maybe I'm still feeling a bit overwhelmed. Right. Having these in a filing cabinet is great, but when I open that filing cabinet, it is very full. And that's why ClickUp allows you to have multiple spaces. The top level of the hierarchy is space and we can have multiple of them. So maybe I want to have another space. I'm going to add a new space called work. That way I can separate my work life from my home life. I'm going to click next and I can give it a little emoji. So let's go ahead and find a house of some kind. Perfect. Give it a color next. Just like a filing cabinet can have a key that you can give to certain people, clickUp allows you to have different access levels for the space as well as all of the other layers we just talked about. So we'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment. But for now, I'm going to say that this personal space, I just want to be shared with me and maybe one other person. I'm going to click next and move on to choose what statuses I want. Now, if you want to learn more about statuses, I suggest you watch this video. But for the purposes of this tutorial, let's keep it as to do and complete. If yours is defaulting to something else, you can just delete these and change the words until they say to do and complete. When you get them how you'd like them click next and move on. ClickUp filing cabinets are a little bit fancier than the filing cabinets that we are used to here, because this is a technology, this is a tool. They have a lot more than just a blank piece of paper for you to work with. And all of these different ClickApps are different features to help you organize those tasks. If you've ever had a note taking template, write a piece of paper that has kind of fill in the blank boxes to have you check certain boxes or write the date, that kind of structure for your notes is what these ClickApps provide. They provide different features and options to allow you to organize your tasks For the sake of this tutorial, and if you're following along as a very first time project management user, I'm going to turn all of these off just to keep things as simple as possible except for custom fields. So moving forward, it's going to ask me how do I want to view these again, just for the sake of tutorial, I'm going to turn all but the required one off. If you want to learn more about this feature, watch this video above. These are called Views, which we will again talk about in a moment. So I'm creating this additional space now and I created just another filing cabinet. Right. I'm going to delete the template list that they put in there. And what I'm going to do is just drag some of my work things into that filing cabinet. So some of the pop ups on the bottom are just letting you know the actions are happening. So I'm going to move those over. And now I have work with job one, job two, and I have space with home tasks, the blank folder in the blank list. So now I have two filing cabinets with a bunch of stuff in it. And again, these filing cabinets are called spaces. Now, I want to talk about some of those other features that I said we were going to get to. And I want to talk through them for the remainder of the video here, because now we're getting the hierarchy right. Your Workspace is down here, your profile is down here. That is not really a part of the hierarchy. That is your account. But the hierarchy contains spaces, folders, lists, and in those lists, tasks like these. And these combine with the subtask you can put in that really will allow you to organize any work as effectively, if not more effectively than your paper pieces, task management stuff. Right. Then your sticky notes, then your notepad and your honey do list. Right. This is going to be more effective. And one of the reasons this is going to be more effective, besides it being cloud based meaning on the Internet and not able to have coffee spilled on it, is because of these extra features. So I'm going to click inside this task now, and this is where it gets a little overwhelming. So take a deep breath. Let's go in. Inside the task itself, we have two sides and I can kind of change the size of this here. And I want to just give you the lay of the land of what happens inside here, because this is ultimately like having a formatted piece of paper to take your notes on or to track your tasks. You don't just have to put a task name like we did on the simple to do list on paper. We have space to put more information and it's just kind of a fill in the blank document. We're with those ClickApps I talked about earlier. You can have different options available. Right now the main option, we have are task name. So this would be task name right here where you type the name of the to do so. Let's just give it a real example of clean kitchen cabinets. You know, I'm a cleaning mode, I guess, today, the description here and to be clear, all of these are optional. But if you want to have a few other notes, maybe in the description, I want to say make sure to use the new sponge. Right. I'm giving a little bit more context explaining what I mean. This is really valuable for tasks where you don't need to do them right now. If I need to clean the kitchen and I'm going to do it today, there's no chance I would write a description. I would just write Clean the kitchen. I'm going to do it later today. But certain tasks you're not actually doing for a while. And having those notes there to remind you what you need to do can be really meaningful. One example here would be filing taxes. Right? This is something that needs to be it needs to be done. But it's a complex process that needs to happen over spaced out period of time, whether that's monthly, quarterly or annually. There's a gap between when you do the taxes and when you need to do them again. So that's where keeping notes can really help make the task completion easier down the line. So here's our to do here's a little bit of note taking for ourselves where we could put links to different websites and we can also using this guy right here, do a whole bunch of other things. So maybe we want to add a checklist. Maybe we want to format things with headers, boldface text. Maybe we want to put a quote in here. Maybe we want to, some of my favorite stuff to do is maybe add a YouTube video, like embedding this video for yourself. Adding more information here will just help us do the task down the line. This is a particularly helpful for tasks that repeat, meaning you have to do them a lot. So it makes sense to take the time to write a really good description. So that is the task description. If we go down just a little bit, you're going to see the to-do section and to-dos have two types of things in them. And this is, I will admit, a little bit confusing. So bear with me first. We have subtasks, which we've already shown you in the other view, but I'm going to show you again here, subtask one might be and we're talk about filing taxes now. So let's just say reconcile bank account. Now, we have the task name here and we have the subtask name here. If I exit out of this task, you can see it actually shows visually exactly like what we saw before. But when I'm inside it, they look slightly different and they show up right here. If I click on this subtask, yeah, it gets a little confusing, but the subtask itself has its own space for description. So I can add a few more notes here. And if I go back to the top, I can click back to see the overall task. So we're at the main task or parent task is what it will sometimes be called. And then we have the subtask or child task and we can kind of pop back and forth between them. Notice the symbol here, plus the breadcrumbs on top. Let you know that you were inside a subtask. Now the subtask is only one part of the to-do area. You can actually add two different types of things here. Subtask would put you right here, but you can also add a checklist. Now, I'm not going to get into the details of subtask versus checklist here in detail. It's not really relevant for this discussion, but I will just say that subtasks, they allow you to click in and do all this other stuff, whereas a checklist is extremely simple. So if I click checklist, all it does is allow me to type something in. I can assign it to somebody and I can mark it complete. There are no other options with the checklist, whereas a subtask I can click into it. I can add a whole bunch of other options then what a subtask can do actually by video on subtask versus checklist up here. So if you want to learn more about that, feel free. But don't, no need to overwhelm yourself if that doesn't feel relevant. Now, I'm going to keep scrolling down just briefly here and highlight the attachments area as well. So if you needed to add maybe a link to your Google Drive or upload a picture. Right. If you need that kind of thing, the attachments down here in the bottom left corner will allow you to add different files from your computer into the task itself. If I were you, I would try to avoid uploading too much to ClickUp not only because it's limited on some plans in terms of how much stuff you can upload, but also because linking is just it's just a little bit better. So if you can, I would suggest going with links kind of like this kind of thing rather than uploading. But uploading is certainly an option if you need it. Last thing on this left side is I want to highlight that there are checkboxes to mark things complete. Go figure. Right. I showed you here on the checklist itself to show things are done or not done. But Subtasks and the parent task itself also has that option. Subtasks you can just check this box and it's marked complete and see it right there. And the overall task has a big old button in the top left corner. Next to the completion button is the assign button. And this is where you can choose who you would like to have this task assigned to. You can set this manually for each task. Or you can use automation's, which I have a video on up here to have it set automatically. Moving on from the assigned field we have the share task publicly. If I wanted to share and broadcast on the Internet this task and all of its details, I could do that from this task here. There's not many applications for this, but it is one of the many reasons why a digital system can be stronger than a physical piece of paper, because I could share the status and the notes and the updates of this task with the whole Internet, if I wanted to, which I don't for this. Going into the three dots, we have some more settings and I'm not going to go through every single one here. Some of them you will not need to deal with for this point in time. But I do want to highlight the ability of sharing and permissions. Now, this is very confusing compared to the share button here, because the symbols are the same. I would not be surprised if that changes soon, but sharing your positions works a little bit different, whereas this is really publishing this task publicly so anyone can see it sharing and permissions, allow me to share just this task with just the people I want to invite. So maybe I won't invite totally not Layla, who's my accountant, to become a collaborator on just this task. I can choose to do that here through the permissions. Again, like we talked about before, we can do this on the task level, the list level, the folder level or the space level. We can customize this at every layer, but I was just highlighting the task permissions on this particular one. So a lot of other good stuff here, but I'm going to leave it at that for now. Moving over to the right, you have the date this was created and we have the due date for the task. Again, these are all optional fields. If you want to keep things simple and the most familiar to you for having a physical piece of paper, maybe you don't want a due date, but the system really allows you to do a lot if you do put a due date in there. So if there's a habit you're willing to change around switching from physical paper to digital paper, I would suggest the due date being a big thing to change. Always assigning things and always adding a due date is a really good habit to get into when you're going digital just because it'll make it a lot easier for other people to collaborate with you. Now, hang in there, we just have a few more settings before we move on over here to the right hand side. Our tasks have watchers. And all this is it's a lot like following on Facebook, if you're familiar to that. This is basically saying who is getting notified about changes to this task? So maybe I want my other Layla Pomper to be notified. That's all this watcher is doing. Just like Facebook allows you to follow certain posts, ClickUp allows you to follow certain tasks. The people who are watching are going to receive notifications about changes to that task based on their own settings. And if you want to learn more about settings, I know more links, but you can watch the video up here to learn more about those watcher settings, because it is a really cool feature, especially if you have a team that you're working with inside ClickUp. Below that we have the activity area. And this is probably, in my opinion, one of the main reasons to go digital versus physical. I can see a changelog of every single thing that has happened to this task since it was created. I can see that I created it, that I changed the name that I added an item that I did this, that and the other all in one place. And while this is great, ultimately, right. Having a log and you do not get that on a piece of paper or an Excel spreadsheet for the most part, I can also message directly within this task and this is just game changing. This little activity side. Here is what it's called. I can send messages and assign tasks to other people directly from this task so I can say, hey, I need help filing my taxes and I can assign that comment as like a mini task to my accountant. And you can see here over on the right hand side, they almost become a different type of subtask that someone can go in and check that box off to let them know that those tasks are done. There are a lot of different options for what we can do here to make this a really collaborative experience. But the fact that this is almost real time messaging built into ClickUp is just so much more effective than having your to do list on paper and then retyping that to send it in an email and hoping that person sees the email before the thing changes. When you have to copy and paste information in and out of a physical notebook, you are versioning, meaning you have one thing on paper, but then you're making a version of it to send it. By the time they send it back to you. This piece of paper has changed and you have two things that you're always trying to keep in sync. Whereas when you have your conversations and the work and the data and the notes all in one place, there is no versioning because as soon as I look at this, I'm going to see what you're seeing in real time. And that's really hard to replicate on a paper based system, especially now if many people are working from home. Now ot enabled in this count is email from ClickUp, which is a feature that allows you to send emails from here directly if you have someone who's not in ClickUp that you're trying to work with. So if you want more info on that, you know the drill. Go up there and you'll see that video now at the very top of this page. Before we leave, I just want to show that it is showing me my location, the filing cabinet. Right, the folder and the list that I'm in. And it's also allowing me to minimize my tasks. So it saves to the bottom here where I can just kind of access it quickly later. Over to the right is an X, and I just like to highlight that this is the way to get out of this kind of focus, detailed task view. So we've talked about the ClickUp hierarchy. We've talked about task details. Now, one last piece of data I want to give you before you go on your way and feel strong and empowered with your newfound knowledge of the ClickUp hierarchy are views. Now, I have struggled to try to come up with a nice anecdote to connect or sorry, a nice analogy to connect ClickUp views to a physical work environment. And I'm sorry, there just isn't one. This one I am I am out of analogies for. These views right here, like you can see in this area, this view is showing me the information I have. It's showing me my tasks. But in ClickUp, unlike a physical piece of paper, you don't have to view one thing in one way always, because this is just data. ClickUp allows us to see the same stuff in, say, a Board View. This is really valuable for teams where one person likes to view things in a certain way, but other people prefer to view things in another way. So if you have some people on your team that like to see things visually like this, but some people on your team who prefer to see maybe a table view, the data is the same, but ClickUp views allow you to see them in different structures of information. So you can focus on just what's important to you, where it gets a little bit cool, in my opinion, is that ClickUp views don't just live on lists. It's not like we just have a piece of paper with a few different formats. We can actually have a whole filing cabinet, aka space, and have this whole space shown in different ways. Now I'm actually going to click on the space where we have some tasks in it. Here we can see we have some tasks here. Maybe I want to show a Board View of all the stuff inside the space. Maybe I also want to see a calendar view of all of the key dates inside the space, maybe want to see an activity view of the changes inside the space. I'm showing different ways to see the same exact data using these views. And this view, just to summarize, because the space itself is just a cabinet, right? The folder is just a container. This is summarizing the tasks within all of this stuff at the space level. If I click on this folder, it's going to show me the stuff that's inside this folder. If I click on the space, it's going to show me the summary of everything inside the space, all in one spot. In these views, we can show them in different formats. We can also choose different options, like how we want to group our data. Maybe we want to group it by due dates, maybe we want to filter it to only show me things where the assignee is me or whoever's viewing it, maybe want to have things grouped by assignee, and as I assign them different people, they will change into different columns. We can customize each one of these views to find what is the most effective way for you to see what you need to do to get things done. And this is a huge change from having a physical static, maybe spreadsheet or a static piece of paper that you can only view in one perspective. And you have to just keep rewriting when you cross so many things off. This is dynamic. It allows us to change the way we look at data, depending on who's viewing it, depending on what we care about and depending on where we are. So maybe for personal life stuff, we like to see things in a Board View like this grouped by assignee or household member. But for work, maybe we prefer to see things grouped by due date in a list view we are able to do that in ClickUp. And that's one of the cool reasons to switch from physical pieces of paper to a digital task management system. And I should say, I've been talking a lot about ClickUp most of these rules, these benefits will apply to any system, but the hierarchy is pretty unique to ClickUp. And I talked about a lot of stuff today and I probably could go on for another half hour here. Just giving you the lay of the land from a beginner who is coming from physical notes to ClickUp. But I hope this gives you enough to really chew on. And just a reminder, you can actually go up to the corner of this video will be a little informal looking I up there. And you can actually click on that to see all of the videos that I referenced in this video here. I will also say in the description below, you will find some information about how I work with people, because just saying I'm a ClickUp Vetted Consultant and I my work is training people to use ClickUp and I have an online course and a community geared towards just that. So if you find yourself having a hard time getting started with ClickUp, I'd definitely check out the resources in the description below. And also, of course, leave a comment and let me know what your questions are. I'd be happy to answer them or even make another video based on your questions, because this video is actually based on one of your questions. So thank you for submitting this. A suggestion for video. But otherwise, thank you guys so much for watching this video. I'll be back next week with two more videos about how to use processes and ClickUp until next time. Enjoy the process.