Trigger your ClickUp Automation Before the Due Date

Want your ClickUp Automations to trigger BEFORE your due date? 

In this video, ClickUp Consultant Layla at ProcessDriven gives a step-by-step tutorial on how to get your ClickUp Automation to trigger PRIOR to the actual due date by building a workaround with ClickUp Custom Fields.

In this video we’ll cover:

00:00 Introduction

00:50 Creating a second Date Custom Field

01:42 Automating a Comment

03:20 Join the ClickingUp Community!

Related Resources

➤ How to make your ClickUp Automations trigger when you want to – and not trigger when you don’t.

➤ Tracking IDEAS vs TASKS in ClickUp | Behind-the-Scenes Look + Bonus Tip about using Automations

Video Blog Post

What follows is an AI-generated transcript from this video. Please be mindful that this transcript may not be 100% accurate.

[00:00:00.060]
In this video, I’m going to talk about how to build a workaround with ClickUp automation to make sure that a task is triggering an automation weeks prior to the actual due date. And I’m going to make more sense if I just show you.

[00:00:13.170]
So let’s dive into ClickUp. So here we are and we have a task with a due date and we want to have an automation trigger, say, one week before this due date. You’d think that would be able to go into ClickUp automation, click, add automations and say when the due date almost arrives.

[00:00:27.240]
But unfortunately, there’s not that option. There’s just due date changes, which means we’ve changed the date or the due date arrives, meaning that due date is today. There’s no trigger for the due date is seven days away. So what we need to actually do in ClickUp, which sounds a little crazy, is we actually need to change our initial due date to be seven days prior. OK, so to make this happen, I’m going to go into ClickUp.

[00:00:50.700]
I’m going to create another date custom field. And let’s call this published date published date two, because I was already playing with this published date and I’m going to make the publish date April 4th or April 24th, rather. I cannot count my months, April 24th. There we go. And I’m going to make my due date seven days prior.

[00:01:07.830]
And this is the setup that we need in order to have this automation work. So then what we can do is automation to say add automation when the due date arrives. We’re basically working with what we got here. Due date arrives. We want to set due date to be fields from Trigger Date and choose published date two.

[00:01:26.100]
I created the twice so excuse, the duplicate there. Basically what this is saying is when the due date arrives our initial due date.

[00:01:31.500]
We can have whatever automation we want to have occur and then also have that date change to the true final due date.

[00:01:38.370]
So whatever we want to have our ClickUp automation do, let’s just create this one.

[00:01:42.360]
I already created it. Once we’re going to leave that, we’re also going to have maybe when due date arrives, we’re also going to have a comment. So in this way, when the initial due date arrives, our comment is going to be added. And then at the same time, that due date is going to change to be our final published date. This is frustrating is not the best kind of situation, which I’d much rather see ClickUp just change their structure.

[00:02:05.790]
So that way we could say when custom field arrives or, you know, four days before due date arrives, we don’t have that option right now. So this is as close as we’re going to get to have this be an automatic process. What I would suggest is making sure that when you set this up in your initial template, you just make sure to make that due date seven days before we used to be able to create an automation here that would say when due date changes, set the custom field to be seven days later, does not seem to let us do that right now.

[00:02:31.080]
So if I want to go in here, publish date two, Tuesday, like there’s not an option anymore, we used to be able to have this set automatically that is no longer available. So I would just make sure that you’re always keeping track of this being seven days in advance. So that way, when that date does arrive, the automation does its magic. That way, the date becomes the same exact date as your published date and you don’t have to worry about it anymore.

[00:02:52.470]
This published date, once you initially set it up, you might choose to have visible and then hide your actual due date from the task in order to make this come to life.

[00:02:59.760]
Obviously, I know this isn’t the perfect solution, but it is a solution to this problem. So if you are trying to have something as some automation be triggered based on the arrival of a due date, this will be the workaround. I suggest if you would like to do it natively within ClickUp without having to work out of other outside tools and just want to say this video in this tutorial was based on a request from a ClickingUp member.

[00:03:20.730]
If you guys don’t know I run ClickingUp community, which I’m pretty sure is the most comprehensive ClickUp community out there, we have live Q&A every week, Monthly Mastermind’s, all that good stuff. And this was just one question that came up in a Q&A a few weeks back. And I want to highlight here on the channel, because I’ve had the question come up publicly quite a few times. But if you’d like to see the other several hundred Q&As that we’ve done privately in private live streams for the members, I want to check out ClickingUp community.

[00:03:43.800]
The link is in the description below to all that good stuff. So thank you guys so much for joining me for another rather quick video.

[00:03:49.980]
I hope this was a helpful one for you. If you enjoyed it, please do click like. Have questions? Leave a comment below and I will see you guys back here with another video until next time. Enjoy the process.