When you hear the phrase ‘spring cleaning,’ what usually comes to mind?
Is it your home? Your wardrobe? Maybe your garage? Whatever is on your spring-cleaning checklist this year, we challenge you to add one more thing to it: your business systems. Why?
Like a house, all of your projects, tasks, to-dos, and everything else inside ClickUp can pile up over time. As a result, it becomes that much harder to do everyday tasks and find what you need when you need it. In other words: You have to maintain and simplify your systems to continue being productive and efficient.
That’s why we’re sharing a few helpful ways to clean out your systems with our ClickUp Clean-out Checklist, so you can have a fresh start and continue getting the most out of your tools. Watch our video below for a first-hand look at all the steps in the process, or continue reading below!
As you log in to ClickUp, take stock of what you’re seeing. Are your spaces still useful? Do you need to create additional spaces for new and growing pieces of business?
Go through each of your spaces and check for ones that have too many folders and ones that don’t have enough. That alone indicates that the space needs to be broken down or condensed even further.
Next, are there any spaces, folders, or lists that you’re not using anymore? We know it can be scary to delete these, so if you think you might use them in the future – or want the data from them – go ahead and archive them. But if you’re confident you have no use for certain spaces anymore, delete them!
Next, it’s time to do a big cleanup of all your ClickUp tasks. Go through everything and get rid of:
Once you tackle all your tasks, it’s time to look at your statuses. If you’ve been a ClickUp user for some time, you probably have an idea of which statuses you’re using the most and which ones you aren’t. Go through your lists and clean up the statuses you no longer use and be sure to keep the statuses throughout your space consistent.
When most people start using ClickUp, they turn on every single view when creating a space. Truthfully, we always inform our clients and Systems School members to do the opposite.
The easiest way to keep your ClickUp looking nice and clean is to start with ‘List View’ and add new views as you create new lists and workflows. For your ClickUp clean-out, go through all of your different lists and make sure you only have the views you need to manage that list.
Pro tip: If you get a message saying that a view is required, you need to go back into your Space Settings and turn the Default Views off to only include List View.
This step is fairly simple but a total game-changer. Go through all of your dashboards on ClickUp and delete any that you don’t use. And, while you’re at it, go through the dashboards you do use and make any optimizations if you need to.
Remember all those thoughts and ideas you didn’t want to lose? Now’s the time to do something with them!
Go through your brain dump section of ClickUp and organize or delegate anything that needs to be stored away or taken care of. Even if you put a task on your calendar for three months out, put it somewhere so you can tackle it when the time is right.
Also, make sure you only have one place to brain dump – whether it’s a dashboard or document. Having multiple brain dump areas defeats the purpose of it, and it’s also more likely you’ll lose track of really important thoughts and ideas.
Pro tip: If you want to see how I organize and manage my brain dump dashboard in ClickUp, check out this video.
Cleaning out your ClickUp shouldn’t be a set-it-and-forget-it solution; it should be something you do regularly to make sure it doesn’t get out of control. Our advice? Set up a specific task that recurs every three to six months to do a quick clean-out. The more you do it regularly, the easier and faster the entire process becomes!
If you’ve been with DaSilva life for a while, you know that we love using templates for virtually everything inside ClickUp. So, to make your systems spring cleaning that much easier, we’ve developed a brand-new ClickUp Clean-out Template!
It has all of the steps listed above and everything else you need to clean out every nook and crevice of your ClickUp. We’ll also show you how to maintain your systems along the way!
If you’re a Systems School Member, you’ll see our brand-new template inside your dashboard! If you’re not a Systems School Member, join us! In addition to this ClickUp template, you’ll also gain instant access to:
