How to Template Tasks in ClickUp | Use Automations to Standardize Your Process

Want to scale your organization without constantly reinventing the wheel? Step one is getting processes and procedures out of your head. From there…where do you put them? Use ClickUp Templates!

In my opinion, ClickUp is a fantastic tool — even in its free plan — to act as your process and task management hub.

Want to try ClickUp? Use my affiliate link here.

In this video, we’ll cover:

00:00 Introduction

3:52 You can save templates at the Task level and customize what you’d like to have as part of the templates.

5:12 Demo of how to load a Template (aka your process!) on an existing ClickUp task

5:50 When you load a Template, you can choose (again) which attributes you’d like to inherit.

6:33 Plus you can start supercharging these features by using the new Automation (beta) features in ClickUp.

8:15 Mini rant about why this is such a game-changer for building living processes in your growing (or scaling) business.

8:50 You can load Templates in an existing task, via automations, or when creating a New Task.

9:51 Don’t forget, you can create templates at various levels for all kinds of processes.

10:20 Changing or updating Task Templates in ClickUp can only be done by overriding (saving over) your existing Template. It doesn’t update other active instances, either.

11:25 You can create templates at multiple levels in ClickUp.

➤ Using ClickUp FORMS + “Stacking Templates” to Create Projects

➤ 6 Ways to Create SOPs & Template Tasks | Advanced ClickUp Tutorial

➤ YouTube WORKFLOW Example | Reuse YouTube Content for Blog, Email, and Social Media using ClickUp

[00:00:00.060]
Hello, everybody. Today, we are in ClickUp with a screenshare tutorial talking about my favorite simple feature that is built into ClickUp’s projects/,task management tool, and that is ClickUp templates. Templates, if you haven’t found them, are kind of hidden all over ClickUp. And templates basically allow you to template to recreate, not from scratch lists, task spaces, whole bunches of things. So you’re not spending a lot of time reinventing the wheel. Why I love templates so much in ClickUp is not because they’re particularly easy to find or easy to edit.

[00:00:37.390]
Unfortunately, at this point that’s not the case. But what they allow you to do in a task is create your process in a place that people can interact with it. So I’m going to give you an example here. I’m in a template space right here, just a test space of a Web designer whose building Web pages and say we have the about page. We’re building lots of pages if you haven’t seen by the other tasks on here. And we probably have a pretty set process as how we do that.

[00:01:04.320]
Maybe we draft the content, gather the assets, maybe there’s images or things that need to go, edit the page, I’m not a Web designer, publisher of the page, let’s just say that’s the process. And every time we have a page and here we can see this, this company obviously has lots of pages. We have those same six subtasks. And inside those, let’s say we have some more guidance. So in here, I put in the title of this video’s images and text rather than do that here.

[00:01:38.170]
We might have a checklist called videos, text, copy, images, call to actions. We have things that we need to gather, we have them as a checklist that we can interactively check off. So every single time we have a page, no matter what the page is, if it’s about page or a contact us page, we have kind of a similar workflow. And in the days of old, this workflow would mean you have to type up an SOP, a work instruction, instructions page that you put in this dusty old binder.

[00:02:16.350]
I don’t know why you’d be building websites back in these times, but you put it in this dusty binder that would sit on the bookshelf and never be looked at again. That’s where this information would go. But with templates and tools like ClickUp that are starting to build them into the place that you’re actually doing the work, we can change the way we look at instructions. We can actually have instructions available to us where we’re working. In this case, that would be ClickUp.

[00:02:39.720]
So while I’m in here, maybe I’m going to assign this task to somebody like me, for example. When I’m assigned the work, I’m going to get notified and I’ll see the exact steps I need to do to be able to complete this task. You’re thinking, OK, great, Layla you just created more tasks. What’s so special about this? Well, coming up next, we have a home page project and me as the manager, I have to go in again, assign somebody.

[00:03:01.650]
Oh, me. I guess I’ll assign her. And once again, she’s looking here and she’s saying, wait, what do I have to do? What I have to do to build the home page me as the manager might say, what do you mean you don’t know? We just remember what we did before, and that’s not how it works. You need to have very clear documentation to make sure people know what exactly is involved in each step.

[00:03:20.680]
So here’s where the magic happens when we have a standardized process, maybe we have these here and we keep building it out, maybe we include some instructions here or some embedded images of :don’t forget to change the alt text for each image”, even boldfaced, and embed things and do all sorts of stuff to make these very, very clear instructions. Invest some time into this one. And then when you’re done, save it as a template, and this is again the magic part, save as a template.

[00:03:55.400]
We’re going to give this ClickUp template a name. We’re going to call it creating any web page. And we can choose what to include in the template that we’re saving. In this case, I know that I want to keep all my subtasks. I do not want to keep any tags. The assignee is going to be different every time, so I don’t want to keep that. Assuming I don’t assign to always me. The custom fields are different every time. I don’t want to keep that. I do want to keep the description because maybe I put some information that’s useful in there.

[00:04:27.240]
The time estimates the same for every web page. Dependencies are the same. Actually, dependencies would be different. Checklists and attachments, take the attachments to be different because every Web page is going to have different images or different pieces that we might attach on to it. Different watchers, different due date, different common attachments. Keep the status nah, take the status off and I’m going to take up the priority, just going to copy these four things and then just save it as a template.

[00:04:54.870]
And you’re just trusting me here to know where this is going to go. So the task template is created. Now, like we just said, I put a lot of time, not really, but imagine I put a lot of time into this ClickUp template. Now, I’ve got another task in here “home page” that I have to sign to this person, Layla, who doesn’t know anything but to make my job as a manager easier, I just go in here and I apply the template, I’m going to slow down how I just did that, I click load template. All of a sudden our same steps all loaded in there, I’m going to do it again so you can watch it with me, click on the task, open up the detail pane. Click on these three dots. Load from template, not save, but load, saving will overwrite, so we want to load from template. In here, we can filter through our templates using these two.

[00:05:42.030]
We don’t have that many. So I’m just going to go right to it. We’re looking for create any web page which we just created and we see here I’m just re-examining what we already looked at, is that it only allows us to bring in four different pieces of information, because when we made the template, those were the only four things that we considered part of the template. But let’s say this pricing plans page is very different. Maybe the subtask, some of the subtask, maybe the time estimate is going to be different on this one.

[00:06:08.520]
We know it’s not going to be whatever it was, one hundred and ten hours. It should be a lot less because it’s just a pricing gauge. So I can uncheck that, go to the custom import. So I’m taking everything but the time estimate load by template that way. Everything comes in except for the time estimate that was in the template. Of course, I can also change things afterwards, but that is the way you can start using templates. Now, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

[00:06:32.180]
They’ve just released their new automations feature, if you’re not familiar, and automation’s can now automatically add a template to pages. So, for example, let’s go to creation when a task is created, apply a template. So let’s just go ahead and do this, let’s when a task is created in this space product pages, we’re going to apply a template called “creating any Web page” done. That’s it, actually, no it’s no going to let me do it now. No, it’s not going to let me do that on the free plan.

[00:07:05.270]
So we’ll just leave it as that turned it on, OK? It’s there. I think we get ten. So let’s hope you don’t mess it up. Guys, I only got 10 tries, so I’m going to go in here and I’m going to say we need a new page. And it’s called “our approach”.

[00:07:17.890]
I’ve created in there now my fingers are crossed here as we refresh our page oh, there it is. So did you just see that in that few seconds that we were here, our approach suddenly got those six subtasks? I saw that because you know what? Let’s do let’s do another page. Let’s do an “our history”. Now, watch this as we go through and watch for it getting the template applied because our template comes with six subtasks. So once we have those six subtasks, we should know that our template has been applied, “our history” is there.

[00:07:47.290]
Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.. ya!

[00:07:53.110]
So when I click on “our history”, it applied the full template. All of the things, the time estimate, the subtasks, the checklist within the subtasks, all of it was imported.

[00:08:03.640]
In this way, you are able to start actually living your processes. You’re able to start using them in day to day life, not keeping them on a dusty bookshelf and saying that you’re supposed to reference them. But no one ever does this multiplied by every single avenue, every single function in your business is where you start actually, you know, being ProcessDriven. You’re able to start delegating things very easily and just reducing the amount of decision making and thought and memory that’s required for every task.

[00:08:32.470]
Because you know what? Even if you make websites every day, it’s easy to forget a step. It’s easy to forget when you’re in that client meeting to collect all your call to actions. But having that checklist, there’s no excuses anymore. There’s nothing else that you need to keep in your head. And remember, it’s all out there on the page and that’s all just by using this template feature. Now, I showed you a way to access it through the task pane.

[00:08:54.160]
This is usually how I access it. So whether you have a new, whether you have an existing task or you’re creating them, you can access them through these three dots here, the ellipses. You can also apply things automatically using automation’s. Let’s manage them here, as I showed you. You can also do a whole lot more, we can also create tasks from a template. I don’t know why the icon is different here, but it’s it’s still here, not the ellipsis, but create instantly from template.

[00:09:23.640]
We can go ahead and pick our template and have a task be created. So what page do we want to make today? YouTube videos, maybe we want a page for that. It’s going to pull in all of our areas, create task. So we’ve created that task. There’s a lot of different ways to go ahead and creating tasks from templates. I find it easiest to go through here. But if you’re someone that uses this quick demand here, you’ve also got that in your favor.

[00:09:47.770]
I’ve been using the example of templates at the task level, and I think that’s enough to get the point across of how you can use this for both, you know, client services, your Web production process for everything, but also your content creation. I have a YouTube production checklist that I use, which I would be happy to share. If you guys leave a comment, I will put a video up about that. Whatever you do in your business that you do more than one time or anything that you want to delegate, definitely get that in here, get that as a template.

[00:10:16.480]
Right now, there is not an easy way to manage templates. So if I were to say change our process. Wireframe the content in, say, we do, we use Google Docs to wireframe. That’s to mock it up and we want to change our process. It’s a little bit of a pain right now. You actually have to save as template and override. It’s very, very old school way to build templates and it does not update, update every other instance, just so you know.

[00:10:44.830]
So when you go to update your process, kind of a pain in the ass right now, you can update it, but it will not update all of the active instances of it. So when we go to our approach, we will not see that new updated. They are not linked. It’s just kind of copied and pasted as of that moment of time.

[00:11:00.940]
So if I wanted to update this, do do do. I would have to reapply and you see it duplicates everything because it’s just reimporting, just copy and pasting. So not ideal. I would expect some new features to come out from ClickUp probably in the next year or so updating this piece of it. So it’s a little bit more like across the street. But for now, just be aware.

[00:11:22.470]
I’ve been talking about templates at the task level. I should note, you can also do them at the list, list from template, also the folder and space and so on. So you can have settings that are templated and you can also have views that are templated, templates galore. But now at least you’ve got a way to start thinking about them. If this video was helpful for you. Be sure to leave me a comment. If you’re interested in learning more about my YouTube production or just giving you some more examples about what types of templates you might want to set up, leave me a comment. Of course, subscribe, like follow. And if you want to kind of have more dialogue about this when it comes to your own business, be sure to join the Facebook group. Link is in the comments below. We talk about this stuff both in coworking hours together and through live videos and all that kind of fun stuff. So be sure to check out the description of this video for links and ways to stay in touch.

[00:12:10.350]
So thanks for watching. Have a good day.