Welcome back to ClickUp Weekly episode number 18. Today we're going to be talking about personal time off just launched in ClickUp. We'll talk about a couple feature requests. And we'll dig into a new opportunity for you to get up to speed on how all of these ClickUp updates can be applied in your workspace. So, we'll talk through all of that. Uh my name is Gray MacKenzie. Thank you for being here. If you are not already subscribed to ClickUp Weekly, make sure that you subscribe for all the latest on what's going on in ClickUp and how it applies specifically for your team. And with that said, let's go ahead and dig into personal time off in ClickUp. So, uh out of office, vacation time, vacation days, personal time off, PTO, they're all kinds of names uh for this, but ClickUp has released um this uh personal time off feature in the platform. We'll see an update in here uh that came out just 4 days ago. Um walking through uh a little bit of how this works. And I just want to take you in so you can actually see it. It's helpful to read the quick review. Yeah, you can add your time off. We'll be able to see that and I'm going to show you where in Teams Hub. That's going to be the best place to see it. Right now, you can see it in different places as well. Um it's going to auto-adjust your capacity, which is one of the most helpful pieces here. You can do custom time off. And so, we're going to talk through the good, which is, "Hey, here's what's in it now." And we're going to talk through uh the bad, which is, "Hey, this is only available if you're on Business Plus and above." And for some folks watching this, you're going to say, "Wait a second." Let's go to the pricing page. Uh where is this Business Plus thing that I'm hearing about?" And so, we'll we'll dig into all those details. First, let's go ahead and go into the workspace. Um so, I'm here. I'm at the Teams Hub. Obviously, this is uh empty. You can see I've got some time off here. So, this is where whoever's on your team I don't think we've got any other time off here. But all time off would show up here in your Teams Hub. And to get to that uh from your left menu, you know, if you if I didn't have it pin, it would show up here. Um but it's this, teams icon. So, to set it, you can go to your uh profile from anywhere in the app. You can pull this up, and we can add time off um directly here. We can add uh custom reasons. Now, you want to be a little careful, just like anything else in ClickUp, how many different custom types do we allow or do we set up? But, pick and choose, hey, I'm going to be off this whole week for vacation time or sick time or for whatever reason, and I can save that, and now I can see all my upcoming time off as well. Now, in some other apps, time off automatically changes your notification settings. Um none of that happens here, but it does automatically change your capacity and availability. So, um I would then want to see, obviously, who's got uh time off coming up. If I'm an admin, I can change this, I can say, "Hey, Alex has uh or maybe we'll pick a different date here. We'll pick a couple days. Alex, well, somehow we already know he's going to be off sick. Uh I can see what's coming up in terms of time off, but I can add it for other people as well. So, if you're an admin for your team and you're trying to do scheduling, and you know somebody's got time off coming, but they don't have it in here yet, you could add it here. Now, I've not tested yet um the API side of this. Uh so, if this is available, this is going to be a very popular um integration to go build and take uh directly from your HRIS system, and push that that time into um the actual time off feature in ClickUp. If it's not yet available, we're going to go back to some of the workarounds that we've been using for years uh to go do this and automatically uh manage and maintain it. Um and we can get into that if you're interested in a future episode, but uh I think the easier solution is just for that to be added in the API. So, we'll have to we'll have to look up what that looks like. Okay. Uh enough there. So, let's go to um workload then. And so, if I want to look at our team's workload, so uh my capacity is set at 40 hours. But, you can see for this week specifically, I only have 32 hours of capacity showing here. Now, I don't have much scheduled for this week. So, it's automatically blocking my 8 hours of capacity for the one working day left that we have here. If I go to next week, you can see I've got 24 hours of capacity. Alex also has 24 hours of capacity. So, I've got some vacation time here on the front end. Alex is pre-scheduled to be sick uh on the back end of the week. So, um it's super helpful that this is already accounted for here, and we can see where we run into issues if we do run into issues from the workload view, which we're going to use pretty frequently uh as we're moving through uh these items. So, let's go back here uh to this. Now, Business Plus plan and above. And I have not read through this entire thread here to see um if you're running you know, if if you are a ClickUp power user, you are probably on the Business Plus plan or higher. Business Plus is a hidden plan that ClickUp has between Currently, as I'm recording this at least uh that sits between Business and uh the Enterprise plans. If we go here, you've got a you know, Free Forever, Unlimited, Business, Business Plus, um and you'd likely see this in your billing interface inside ClickUp itself, and then the Enterprise plan. And it's got some really nice features uh of Enterprise, some of the classic things that you know, there's a a step in between here in terms of number of automations per month that you can run. Um it's got some custom role stuff that is helpful as well. So, Business Plus is a good step if you're not quite ready for Enterprise. Most of the teams that we're working with at ZenPilot wind up on the enterprise plan. There's enough there that the value makes sense and it's not, you know, depending on your experience with enterprise softwares, there's some enterprise softwares where hey, the jump here is going to be, you know, free, $7, $250 a month. ClickUp and most of the competitors are not that type of gap pricing wise between it. I'm not allowed to say aloud what the you know, in in public here what the enterprise pricing looks like, but but I just want to give you that like, hey, it's not crazy to go be on the enterprise plan. Okay. And if you are looking for help buying ClickUp and you're trying to figure out what is the right plan for me, where should we go, all that kind of stuff, talk to us here at ZenPilot. We are obviously ClickUp partners. We can give you advice on hey, what may or may not make sense. But we are also ClickUp licensed resellers and so we can also help you through that entire process of purchasing ClickUp. And that said, some some like I've had plenty of conversations where I'll come back and said, hey, you thought you needed to be on this plan or you thought this was going to solve that that feature set. Like, hey, this may not be the right solution for you. So, one of the one of the nice things about sitting in the seat that we're in is there's no and because we're going to deal with our customers over long-term, there's it removes a lot of the incentive for short-term thinking of hey, let's just get you to sign up for the software and buy it. If and I've sat in the software provider seat previously before ZenPilot 2013 to 2017 when we were running a company called Do Inbound which then morphed into ZenPilot today. I think I may have told some of this story on a previous episode. Um, we were on the software uh side of things. And um on the software side, there's a little bit more in some of uh this isn't always true. Obviously, you still have, you know, like I think everybody should care about hey, what's your reputation and are we doing the right thing for the people who are interacting with? If we're really working with great people and we respect them and love them and want to see them be successful. And that's my you know, thinking today on the definition of love is doing what's ultimately best for others. Uh if that's true for us, then we will we don't want to uh do anything that is short-term thinking, hey, let me just get you signed up for this. But in our seats specifically, because we need to see teams be successful with the full from the design phase to the build phase to the training phase to the launch phase to the optimization phase of ClickUp. Um we do not want to get people who are not the right fit for ClickUp signed up on the platform and then realize down the road, oh no, like now now we've got all these problems and and uh you know, death that we need to recover from. So, that's a long way of saying we're happy to have a conversation around is ClickUp actually the right fit for you and which plan will be right for you. Anyways, um that's going to be a disappointment to some folks, so I fully expect to see a number of folks saying uh similar to what Jackson said here, uh I don't remember where this was promised to all tiers. Um but it'd be great to get somebody from ClickUp on. Uh so, I will try to chase this one down a little bit and just figure out hey, uh what happened? This may this may be correct or may not be correct. I don't remember that this was uh promised to everybody across the board. I also realize if you don't say, people, you know, fill in that they uh connect the dots on their own and say, I assume this would would have been done for everybody. Uh this is the second phase of this work schedules feature and there's more that's coming here around calendar syncing, how Gantt works, um and a couple other features that are tied to this as well. Um so just be aware of that. And uh I didn't show you this one, but assigning a task when someone else is uh scheduled to have time off, this triggers a warning, and that's actually super helpful and something that we didn't have with uh our situation before, and and probably that you should be aware of is if I'm, you know, I'm adding a new task for Alex here, um and, you know, I've got to pick wherever this is going to go. We'll put it here. Um if I went and go and created this task, um then if if it was just simply no capacity, uh then it would not give me any warning that, hey, he's over capacity. Um but this, in its full implementation, you know, when this is working correctly, um and it's happening during his, you can see, like time off in this interface here, uh and you can see this still early in the in the deployment. But if this wasn't a you know, he just had no capacity left for it in his schedule, then I wouldn't get any warning. So, this is the first step towards at least a warning for, hey, this person's out of office, not necessarily that um you know, he doesn't have any capacity to take it on. All right, that's a lot to cover, um but this is uh a really helpful feature. I think that almost everybody who's got access to this will start using it right away. There's no reason not to. It's extremely easy uh to include in your procedures for anybody who's submitted or approved the time off, you know, you get a time off request as an admin, then you jump right into ClickUp, go to their profile, and add it for them if they have not already added it. There's not a um a request feature. So, this is a popular solution that we built for a lot of teams is uh an out-of-office manager where there is a approval process. Somebody requests the time off, a manager, their manager gets it, uh, approves or says, "Hey, we've got four other people who are off the same time, you know, can you do this another time?" Whatever. Um, so there's no approval component to this yet. Um, so just be aware of that as well. This doesn't solve for every use case um, that folks have, but it's a great step for ClickUp. So, um, yeah, I'm I'm grateful for this feature feature coming to the platform already. All right. Okay, two items on the wish list I want to talk about and a couple workarounds here. So, form submission creating a subtask. Right now, when you, uh, submit a form in ClickUp, it automatically creates a task. Um, but there's a request here from Damon, uh, who posted this from a support ticket and this is from years ago and you can see a bunch of other people uh, have been tagging in on this. Sometimes when you see, you know, four or five 10 different requests in the same set and there's not that many total votes. There's 230 on this one. Uh, it's like all the same team who are all jumping in trying to flag this one. But I think this is worth noting and saying, "Hey, the use case here is primarily um, I'm using a support form and I want, uh, you know, the customer who submits this to automatically I want that task that gets created to then become a subtask under that customer's profile, not a parent task." Um, so I think that this is is worth um, mentioning. I'm not actually You can see I have not upvoted this one yet. Um, I wanted to highlight it because I do think if this is a need that you have, I'd love to hear about it and understand what you're trying to solve for. Um, but I think it's worth highlighting and I want to just talk through, "Hey, how would I solve for this now in ClickUp?" So, if I had to go solve for this today in ClickUp, let's grab We're in in non-billable section here. The way that I would solve for this today is I'd go create a new automation and say, you know, hey, when a task gets created and it comes from a form specifically, let's grab that. Then, I might want to do something like a you know, create a subtask and pull through um you know, whatever information we may have. Now, here you're going to run into a little bit of a challenge because you're trying to find the parent task uh that's coming in. So, this would probably be a better like the the better solution here is going to be from make. Um but there's some automation work that you could do to go create hey, what is the subtask name, you know, I want to create this and this is, you know, form submission you know, manage form submission. If you needed a template, you could pull it through, but you can grab most of the information, pick your custom fields and say, hey, for this custom field, I want to select, you know, this value that we have. Um So, I would probably use a third-party automation tool to do this. Um but you do have the ability through automations in ClickUp to help turn those in. And then, what you'd wind up wanting to do is after you had your subtask created, if you're happy with that, then you'd want to update the status of the parent task and say, hey, this one's now closed out and done. So, anyways, I thought that was interesting enough that was worth highlighting. The second one was this, custom fields. This totally makes sense. I just had a call yesterday um with a team where dependent custom fields would be super helpful for their situation. And so, I was wanting to mention what this means and then, um talk through how how we'd solve for this today in ClickUp as well. Uh yes, meme. Hi ClickUp team, I'd like to request a feature that would significantly improve how we organize and categorize tasks. Hierarchical or nested drop-down custom fields. Use case, we work with content categorization that requires multiple levels of taxonomy. For example, if the category is healthy living, then I'd want to fill in wellness, alternative medicine, herbs and supplements. Um and then here we've got how they're working around it today. And I thought this is um you know, somewhat clever and worth pointing out. We're forced to create multiple separate drop-down fields, one for each tier, or use visual prefixes like m-m- to simulate hierarchy in a single field. Both solutions are clunky and make filtering and reporting difficult. Uh definitely true. So, the requested feature is native support for parent and child relationships, and then cascading drop-downs. So, Ismium, this is for you, and we've got a bunch of other folks who've you know, requested the same type of You can see this is a very popular uh request from folks. So, um this doesn't this doesn't get solved for right now uh in ClickUp totally, but let's just add a you know, random ClickUp weekly task. And so the idea here is if I said well, this this could be different a couple of different things. Clients, I could pull right now from all the clients across the workspace. What would be super nice is if I had a client group and it was my client group, now this client field gets filtered down to my clients. I realize that one wouldn't always hold true. Um what swag are we sending this customer? Oh, it's a t-shirt. Well, now like what size is that t-shirt going to be? You know, like there's there's a ton of really simple um things that we may want. So, uh and if we don't do that, if we need t-shirt size, but if it's a hat, we need hat size, or it's a water bottle and, you know, how many ounces? Like we wind up with a bunch of different custom fields potentially. And let's say that we had a custom field that was size, we had a custom field that was what type of swag, are we sending a hat? Are we sending a shirt? Are we sending a hoodie? So, that's one. Well, if our next drop down is simply size, then if I ever want to go filter for, well, how many small shirts do we send out? I realize this is a dumb example. How many small shirts do we send out? I can't just filter by small cuz that's going to include different things. So, I've got to do multiple uh filters to get there. If I want to make it easier, I could say, you know, custom field for hat size, custom field for hoodie size, custom field for shirt size. Uh, in that case, we just wind up with a ton of custom fields, and that's super common um to have a ton of custom fields. So, this problem is not solved in ClickUp today, but there is a tool a feature that really helps with this. And this is custom field by task type. So, using custom task types, um you can create, you know, a a ton of them or keep it limited. We've talked about this before uh on ClickUp Weekly. But, if I pick, hey, this is a blog post, uh this one actually doesn't have any custom fields, but you would see custom fields that come from the task type, and then custom fields that come from the location level. So, let's see if we have any. Uh a deal does not Maybe a meeting. A meeting does have a couple different um options here. So, this would give you um you know, a a way to to subset this and get custom fields to some degree by that. So, let's go back and see I actually I should have thought through this ahead of time. I didn't think through this ahead of time. In this case, um I'm not sure that it would make sense to say, hey, this is healthy living content versus this is lifestyle content something else. If it did, though, you could then have the you know, your custom fields tied to that. You want to avoid both mistakes. You want to avoid not using custom task types at all. And then we want to put all kinds of things and the big benefit here is if this was a deal, a typical deal is going to have a whole bunch of things associated with it that a person field uh wouldn't have associated with it or meeting wouldn't have associated with it. Let's see if there's anything for uh Form response doesn't have anything in here. Tools also don't. Okay. Well, we'll build out some of that stuff so that we've got uh you can see tasks uh do have some custom fields. So, we've got better examples in this demo works So, the one mistake is don't use custom task types at all. Well, that's silly because you've got so much uh opportunity to slim down what fields live at the location level and then what is specific only to that task type. Actually, a lot of stuff falls by task type. But, the other mistake to make is that we've got blog, healthy living blog, lifestyle blog, you know, whatever you know, fashion. This is like whatever whatever we're talking about here. Um and if we've got 200 different custom task types, that can also be challenging uh to keep up with. So, um this does take some design work to make sure that we find the sweet spot between those two things. Okay. I want to make sure we covered both of those wishlist items both because I think they're worth uh if they're applicable and relevant to you upvoting and staying tuned in to what updates are happening with those items. But, secondly, um because I think it's helpful anytime you see a feature request to think through, "Hey, how would we work around this in the platform today? What could we do to solve for this problem uh and make it as simple as possible for our end users to have success in the system?" And speaking of success in the system, June 16th, so a week and a half after this goes live, uh we are doing a live session uh where we walk through ClickUp updates for your workspace specifically. So, I'm going to bring on Alex from my team. He and I are going to spend uh 4 or 5 minutes or an hour digging deep into what is the overall ClickUp product roadmap vision, where they headed. We're going to dig into uh what's already been released. We're talking a little bit about, hey, what's coming up? And in light of that, how would we take what's already been released and go start applying it to your workspace. And want this to be as actionable as possible. So, like, what things should we prioritize? You don't want to be making major changes to your workspace every single week because you're going to lose a lot of adoption from from the team. If the team is like, well, you know, uh Jerry's going to change what we have again next week and then the week after that and the week after that, uh there's you lose a little bit of buy-in every time that you keep changing things and say, "Hey, I know we tried this. Now let's try this instead. Now let's try this instead." Um so, wherever we can, we want to be on a clear trajectory. Hey, here's where we're headed and this is why the roadmap idea is so important. Here's where we're headed. Now, in light of that, with the with what we have today, here's how we're going to take steps on this one smooth trajectory instead of uh we tried this, then we tried this, then we tried that, then we tried you know, we're we're just bouncing around all over the place. So, you can go here. We'll link this in the show notes, zenpilot.com, webinar, what's new in ClickUp 2026. Uh couldn't I come up with an easier URL for you there. Um but go register for this, save your seat. Uh I think we've got room for 500 folks on this and I haven't checked uh in a couple days, but I think we're around 180 people uh who registered. I think this has only gone out through email so far. So, we'll be we'll be promoting this more. Um but anyways, make sure that you've got a seat and can jump on and join us for this uh as well. So, I just want to make you aware that that resource is also available. It's free uh to come on and join. Um and we'll try to make that as quick as possible. Try and save some time at the end for questions as well. All right, that brings us to the end of episode 18. Make sure that you are subscribed if you're on YouTube. Uh leave a comment. Let me know what your thoughts are on the features that are out today, any questions that you have, and any topics you'd like us to cover in the future. You can join the show at zenpilot.com/clickup-weekly. If you haven't yet subscribed to the show updates there, you can subscribe and then uh /guest at the end gets you to the application form to come on and join for an interview. zenpilot.com/newsletter gets you into First Class Operations. Would love to see you there as well. All right, great being with you here today. Thanks for your time, and we'll see you next week in episode 19.