Welcome to ClickUp Weekly, episode number 19. My name is Gray McKenzie. I am your host. I'm also the founder at ZenPilot. And each week on ClickUp Weekly, we are spending time digging into what's new in the platform, what's coming, and what we've learned um and seen in the wild to be able to share with you so that we can all get better at how we operate together. So, uh we've got a great show for you today. We're going to spend some time on ClickUp's scheduling engine. Um we'll talk about how uh a new feature that allows uh parent tasks to stay in sync with subtasks due date-wise. We're going to talk a little bit about forms, some stuff that we've seen clients and other ClickUp users having some wins with. We'll talk about feature requests, all that all that good stuff. So, we've got a great episode for you here today. I appreciate you being here. If you've not yet subscribed, go ahead and subscribe to the show and leave a comment. Uh let us know what what topics you'd like to see covered or any questions or thorny things that you'd like to see ironed out in ClickUp. We love tackling each of that stuff each week. All right. Let's dive in here. So, uh I just want to call this one out. This is a little bit nerdy, but the rebuilt uh Gantt scheduling engine. So, under the hood, there are no new release notes from ClickUp this week. And we've got the new in ClickUp section here. Um we don't have new release notes publicly from ClickUp. But under the hood, the project management squad at ClickUp has done a ton of work on the scheduling engine. So, the core logic of the app that runs things um like due dates and uh durations of tasks and rescheduling and dependencies and um all this different stuff. ClickUp's been releasing a bunch of features around this. We've covered this on ClickUp Weekly. We're going to talk specifically about parent task due dates auto remapping from subtasks. So, like the start date and end date, the start date inheriting the earliest subtask's start date and due date inheriting the latest due date from the latest subtask. Having those things be in sync together, uh that's a subset of the scheduling engine. And long story short, ClickUp has centralized a lot of that stuff and built it out. So, it's now more solid and and operates in a unifier unified way across the whole platform. So, we don't have uh some of those things being built in in different areas or living in different areas. And that has led to some improvements uh from a numerical perspective on their side in terms of customer satisfaction, support tickets. There's a lot of stuff coming from that. I don't experience that uh numerical win as much as I experience just Hey, this is working better and we're getting some of the key features that we needed. Talking about features like uh time off, skipping non-working days, uh the duration app um working. So, we can say not necessarily here's the start date and here's the end date um because those things may shift over time, but that this task is going to take us 6 days to get done. Then if I schedule it, it automatically knows how to set start and end dates for me. So, let's just look at this parent task dates auto remap from subtasks. And I want to talk about this because this is um this has been a key part of what we've taught teams for a while. We're looking at Gantt view here and we don't have to. We could look at it in this section. Maybe the easier thing to start with is just like what are we looking at here? We're looking at uh let's expand out our sidebar here. We're in our clients area. This is all of our clients working. We've got a client and they've got a website project that we're working on. And that website project has any number of phases to it, an R&D phase, a prototyping phase, a content phase, a dev phase, a launch phase, so on and so forth. Well, in the wireframing phase or the prototyping phase here, let's zoom out a little bit. You can see we've got any number of subtasks to go along with this. [clears throat] And each of those subtasks has some dependencies. We've got to do this, then this happens, then that leads to this. You know, that like so So, we're just going step-by-step sequentially. These are the processes that we work with a ton of teams to improve, to build out, to document, and to deploy uh really quickly and easily. Um well, that's all great. But right now, we need a dependency set from the final subtask. You can see this is actually going back and it's blocking the parent task so that um we can keep these things in sync and when we want to reschedule something, we can now reschedule the whole thing. Well, with this feature that ClickUp has, we no longer need to do that cuz that was a workaround before for us to be able to keep timelines in sync. So now, I could go to uh the task itself, and we could turn on sync dates with subtasks, and it'll automatically stay in sync with Well, here's where it would have to start, and here's where it would have to end, which is great. Uh for most teams, I don't think you're going to want to turn it on at a task-by-task level. I think you'll actually probably want to turn it on at the list level. And so, to do that, you can go here in your list settings, and under more, you've got the option for the subtask date sync, and so that's where you would turn this on or turn this off. So, uh I know we've shared about the news, but like what are the mechanics of Where do we turn this on, turn it off? Um on a webinar that we did this week talking about ClickUp's roadmap and what they've already pushed in 2026 and what's coming up next, uh Alec, my head of delivery, and I walked through this, and somebody asked a great question, which was like, "Hey, can we just get rid of all dependencies then?" And the answer is no. Like, there's definitely still need for dependencies. In fact, this scheduling engine improvement is bringing in even more things that are helpful, like uh skipping non-working days. So, we'll pull this feature up, and we'll look at that in a second. Um but also the ability to do different types of dependencies. So, it's it doesn't eliminate all dependencies, but it does change our little hack kind of a hack, like the workaround that we've had here of the last subtask has to block the parent task. Um we're able to take a step out of the process and that's going to save teams a good amount of time with that feature. So, I'm super excited about that. If you've used it, I'd love to hear your feedback. If you haven't used it yet and um and you've got a use case where this would be super helpful, I'd say most of the time you want this to happen, not all the time. Uh one of the features that I didn't mention with this new scheduling engine and what that has allowed is this baseline feature. We talked about this in a prior episode of ClickUp Weekly, but with baselines, one of the reasons that teams did not want these to be synced up previously was, "Well, what if I had to move subtasks and now they're happening way behind the parent task. Well, I would still want to see when that parent task needed to be done." Um baselines now allow you to get that answer without having to have your uh actual work be out of sync in the system. So, all of this stuff ties together um and it's super helpful, but I just wanted to give a big shout out to the ClickUp team for their work on improving this. And then, let's go back here and grab this skip non-working days uh feature. This one's pretty simple, but you do need to turn on the ClickApp if you want it. So, you've got your app center and you can pull it over open. And if you start searching, this is the easiest way to go find this, but you want tasks to start and end on working days. If you have this turned on, you're not going to be scheduling over the weekend. So, if you have a task that was going to take, you know, 5 days to get completed, you started on Monday, it's clearly going to end on a Friday. But, if you start it on a Friday, uh it's not going to be done 5 days later on Oh boy, putting myself to the test here, on Wednesday or on Tuesday, uh it's actually going to be done uh [clears throat] on Thursday of the following week. So, that is another feature that's worth pointing out. If you don't have this ClickApp turned on, uh you probably do want to use this unless you have you know then you're like going to have to set your non-working days across the team and what do we actually uh work on. The other consideration um with this is you just need to know hey I can't just flip it on. You can see this one is uh global. So there's you don't select this on a list by list basis or folder by folder or space by space. This is either on or it's not on which I think is a good thing. Um but you do need to make sure that the rest of your team is on board when you turn this on if it's not already on for you. Okay. So that's a little shout out to uh the ClickUp team and what is new in ClickUp this week. Um if you are not yet using forms in the platform, I'm working on kind of this huge uh overview and resource of some of the coolest uses of forms in the platform. But this is one that I feel like is a either like a an extremely simple feature or teams get crazy complex with it. Um so all you do is you add a new form from a view. So you you know grab whatever the form is. And they've got these cool like hey you can start with something that you may need. Um we'll grab an IT request form as an example. Now these forms by default because these fields are going to be uh custom fields in your system except for you know you can add in stuff. So if we're building this and we wanted to add a question here we've got some default task properties. So we already have the task name. This is going to become the Um and you can see that listed here. This is going to become the task description. These are attachments. So you either have task properties or you have custom fields. So most of these templates for forms uh aren't coming with uh custom field a ton of custom fields already built out because they don't want to clutter your workspace with all kinds of other custom fields. But what's super cool is as you're building this and applying this, you can do some of the things that um like there's just a couple things that I wanted to call out that surprise people. You can send a redirect. So, I may have shared this example before. But let's just go to someone signs up for a blueprint to work with InVision Pilot. There's some basic information we just need to capture and so we'll redirect them here uh right away from payment. But then you've got the ability to then redirect again to oh, here's the next step that you need to take. So, that redirect can work well. Now, the one feature that uh some people have asked for is could I have a conditional redirect? So, I want to send somebody uh different places based on what they've submitted. Uh you can't do that yet. So, that feature's not there. Um but this is actually super helpful. You can also apply a template to form submissions. This is really helpful if you've got uh in this example an IT request form. Well, we already know someone's going to have to review the form submission and then we're going to have to close it in some way. Someone's going to have to do some actions. There may be a template that we'd want to apply there. Common example would be like hey, new client comes on board. Um and if if this is the way that they get into the system or a new teammate comes on board or somebody needs to be off-boarded and uh if a form is submitted is the trigger point for that, we could apply a template that we already have built so that our process is all there. You've got a lot of optionality in terms of how you want to lay this out and build it. So, anyways, I think this is just worth calling out, hey, we have this cool feature here. Now, we do need to think about what we're doing with custom fields. And one of the features that you want to be aware of is you can't set a task type from your settings for forms. So, we talked a little bit about custom task types. Well, an IT request form or if we go look at some of the other examples here, you know, a job application. Well, that might be an applicant custom task type. It's not really a task that might get submitted. So, sometimes that will that will throw some people up and be like, "Oh man, there's no way I can get those set right away." Well, you could use an automation. This would be one workaround for it. So, we could say, "Hey, when a task gets created and we might pick just tasks and we could just pick from forms in this specific location, then uh we could update the task type and say, "Hey, we don't actually want that to be a task. We actually want it to be I don't think we have an applicant in here, but you know, pick whatever the task type is." So, you could do it that way. But, you're using an automation. That's fine. You've got tons of automations most likely in your um subscription. But, if you don't have that, use the template that has that custom task type and you've automatically created it. Uh these forms can be used for all kinds of stuff. Like, we've had plenty clients use it on their website as a front-facing, you know, like a Typeform replacement, but we see it way more commonly with uh customer success, uh customer service, internal operations. Like, if you're paying for another form tool, you probably want to use um ClickUp's forms feature. So, my big request for you is uh what's the coolest form that you've been a part of building? I'd love it if you'd send it to me. In fact, I try to be careful about not putting my email here, but email me directly. Gray uh just my first name @zenpilot.com and I'd love to hear what you if you're willing to share it, um what you've used and I want to put together we're what we're going to putting together is kind of this big resource of uh form examples, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel. And we'll give credit to folks who are contributing to that uh as well. So, we'll highlight highlight your work there as we go. [clears throat] Okay, enough about forms. This came up in the webinar this week, so I just wanted to call this out. Different statuses for tasks and subtasks is not what came up. What came up was how do we follow along with all of this stuff that ClickUp is um having out there? And Alex was saying, "Hey, what I do is I upvote it even if I don't want the feature so that I'm on top of what is what conversation is happening. I'm getting the email notifications that are happening." I was like, "Oh, I don't really use it that way." Um but I I get that. There's not a separate option in Canny here, ClickUp's uh like, you know, roadmap and feed feedback um centralized platform. There's not a good option to just subscribe. But if I could, I don't necessarily want to vote for this because we've been able to solve this just fine with custom fields so far. There are cases um we've talked about the time in status ClickApp that exists where having that ability to hold tasks and subtasks separately would be helpful. I also think it'd be confusing for a lot of users and so I'm not I like a This is one you could um not necessarily talk me into either way, but I see uh valid reasons on both sides to do either one. Well, I thought that was interesting that um Alex would still upvote it purely to get all the updates that are coming out. Caroline posted this, you know, update. Oh, this is interesting. I've never seen these mismatch before, so I wonder if you can update a comment if you're on the other side of this. So, anyways, just to stay on top of, "Hey, what what stuff is coming out?" So, if you are looking at this, you're look I don't I don't think I've shared this before, but if you're looking at feature requests, you're like, "Hey, I wonder what is uh getting a lot of activity? Maybe specifically related to what you have." We look at trending, obviously we could look at top and say, "Hey, what do we have going on?" But if we just looked at this across all things. Like this one, pop-up chat window. Um I would assume that this will probably get merged into another one. I know that there are some other feature requests tied to this. This is uh one way to try and solve it and that makes sense, right? To have instead of doing it right now, I'm using uh the web version and the desktop version and I'm using them for different things. I I do find myself just in the desktop version using chat a lot, but totally get hey, we do need some way to to see this kind of separately. Uh forms create a subtask on a task. Sometimes you'll see this and you'll say, "Hey, actually this one's solvable. That you know, that's no problem to go solve that with an automation uh right now, but anyways, helpful to stay on top of it. So, if you're looking and you want to upvote stuff to know hey, what what is happening? What are the updates from ClickUp's product team on it? Uh that's helpful. So, I also wanted to call out this one because this question comes up a lot and just say, "Hey, you don't need to do this necessarily. You can use a custom field and drop down for stage or call it something similar, you know, not I would not usually use the language status unless you prefix it with something else that clearly says, "Hey, this is what this is meant for." Like subtask status. Uh then use that and you can do all the same pretty [clears throat] much everything except for seeing time and status easily. You may have to solve for that separately. You can accomplish through using that custom field. Okay, we're running up on time, so I'm going to hit these relatively quickly. These are just three things that came up in client conversations this week that led to some big wins. Real simple one, each new hire set their start date internally in their task, auto set all the due dates in their onboarding template. This was a big win for a a very large ClickUp client. Actually, a professional sports team. Um which is super cool. This rarely happens, so I thought that this was a funny one to call out. We usually see uh a workspace and when we go into ClickUp and we're looking at spaces, there are a ton, you know, someone who's been in ClickUp for a little while, they've got even messier than this. They may have 50 different spaces going on. Well, we've got another client who said, "No, we only need one space." And so, everything was in spaces or in a single space, but their internal operations uh trying to report on data from that space um their internal operations stuff was messing some some of that stuff up, and so breaking out a separate operations space helped to keep reports clean for most of teams that were working with. They'll have some version of this, you know, growth space uh delivery space for all their client work and an operations space a separate template space uh for managing and seeing the live version of their templates, and often like a record space or kind of the core five that uh super commonly happen. Uh this is the one just to be aware of if you're using automations tied to custom fields and you start merging custom fields together um you just need to pay attention to which ID is preserved. Um and there are use cases where uh that you may wind up with a different custom field altogether. So, just be aware of that. Uh that was causing some challenges for teams who thought, you know, hey, there's all these ClickUp bugs. What actually happened was there was some custom field cleanup uh but not paying attention to merging custom fields together and the ultimate ID that was then resulting and using that ID in automations, well, when that became the wrong ID, that was causing some heartburn. So, there's a couple couple uh warnings for you. These are all kind of common sense uh things, but just some quick uh pretty pretty straightforward wins, which are the easier ones to talk about on ClickUp Weekly. There's like you know, probably a couple times a month there's something where I'm like, oh, that is such a cool solution, but we have to tee up kind of the whole context uh to help folks through it, so um wanted to call out some of those quick wins today. All right. Appreciate you being here with me on ClickUp Weekly. Um go ahead and subscribe on YouTube if you have not yet. Uh if you'd like to be a guest on the show, zempala.com/clickupweekly-guest, and subscribe to First Class Operations, and we'll see you next time for episode 20 of ClickUp Weekly.