ClickUp has time tracking embedded, which makes it much easier to keep track of how long each task and subtask takes and helps you organize your future projects.
P.S.: Click the hyperlinked text to go exactly to the part of the video where we mention each feature!
We start with a click app called “estimated time” which is very useful to help us understand how long tasks and projects take. Estimated time is particularly important for recurring tasks so you can plan your day and/or week more effectively.
We recommend enabling Rollup time estimates and Time Tracking Rollup both of which show the sum of all time estimates and time tracked on the subtasks on the main task. When this is enabled, the time shown on the task will be a combination of all subtasks and the main task, without having to manually add the time yourself.
Another nice feature is when you turn tasks into templates, it will save the estimated time in the template too, helping you save time when you’re creating a recurring task.
You can also get a better view of your time tracking in a dashboard. In the dashboard, you can see all your time entries broken down by tasks and subtasks, timesheets, for a given day or week.
In list view, you can add a custom field for time tracking and time estimates if you want to see those right away rather than opening each task.
For time reporting, we recommend creating a new dashboard and adding all the related widgets from time tracking, like time reporting, timesheet, billable report, time estimated, and time tracked. You just choose what you want to see and set the filters on.
Time tracking has additional special features that allow you to see deeper than just the time tracked – it allows you to see each user and task, see if they added notes when the clock was started and stopped when the time was added manually, how long they worked on a specific task every day and other useful features like that.
Watch Amalie Show You How To Track Time in ClickUp:
Read The ClickUp Time Tracking Video Transcript
Amalie Shaffer 0:04
Hi, I am Amalie Shaffer with Systematic Excellence Consulting. And today I’m going to go over ClickUpTime tracking. So I was really grateful when I discovered this was part of ClickUp. Because we had been using Toggle, not that Toggle– Toggle is a great tool. I just really like the fact that the time tracking is embedded in ClickUp. And I think it makes it a lot easier to associate it with certain tasks and things like that. So when you want to do time tracking, it is done inside of a task.
In this task already, I have tracked some time, or just put it in that I’ve tracked it. We also have something called estimated time. And that’s a click app that you can toggle on and off. We really like the estimated time because it helps us understand workload and how long something’s going to take. And then how much can that one person do in that day when they’re doing maybe a task that doesn’t take very long or tasks that takes really long either way, it helps us to determine how long something takes.
And what I’ll show you in a moment is our is the dashboard where we pull the timesheets and why where we look at the estimated times. So this is particularly important for recurring tasks, or even if it’s projects that you do every once in a while, maybe it’s not something you do every week, maybe it’s a launch that you do once a quarter. But if you understand how long those things take, it helps you to plan more effectively, understanding what resources you need, how many man hours is it going to take, or a woman hours is it going to take, to get the project done.
And a lot of times when we’re doing things like this, where we’re trying to figure out how long things take, it will take doing it a few times to really understand how long something takes. The first time we do something it generally takes longer than we anticipate. And as humans, we usually underestimate how long things will take.
But you really, you know, you have to go through the process of creating the process we’re creating, you know, the steps that you’re going to go through, then you can standardize it, and then you can optimize it. And maybe that looks like adding audit automations, which might cut some time out. Either way, those are really the steps you need to kind of flow through as you’re creating processes.
So as far as the time tracking, one of the other click apps that we have turned on is the roll up the time estimate roll up and the time tracked roll up. And what that does is any sub tasks that have estimated times or track time, so in the subtasks, I just went ahead and put in that I tracked time and then I estimated the time as well.
And so what you can see on the main task is you can see the roll up time and the estimated time because it’s cumulative here. So if let’s say we add an additional sub task number, we’ll add number four. And I click on that, let’s see, it’ll probably pop up one, there it is.
Okay, so if I click on the sub task, and let’s say we estimate this to be 30 minutes, so I’m just going to type that in. And when you create tasks into templates, it saves your estimated time in the template as well. If you create the template, let’s say this is like our blog process. And we each of our sub tasks has an estimated time, it will save that as the part of the template which is really great because then every time you duplicate it or use a template, those estimate times will be there already. So let’s say we’re estimating that time.
Now for the time tracker, all you do is start the timer by clicking on it. Now, down here in the far right corner is the timer, which is really nice. So even if you have to leave the task or this page or whatever, you still have your timer down here. And if you have the app on your phone, then you can start the timer from there as well. So right down here is your timer.
If we’re good to go, we’ll just go ahead and turn that off. Let’s say you know I forgot to start the timer. I can add it manually here. So let’s say this took me an hour versus just 30 minutes. So I’m going to go ahead and hit save, it’s now going to have an hour in 19 seconds. And we’ve estimated 30 minutes. Okay. So that’s how you time it.
And then you can also add notes here. So if you wanted to add notes, we could enter a note here. This was the last piece to finish. And then let’s say maybe we did 30 minutes. Okay, so now it’s added the note, and it’s added in, we’re at the estimated time. So again, you’ll notice up here, it’s now rolled up or calculated all of that time that we’ve added. And you can do the timer in the main tasks. So you just start the timer. So now it’s tracking the time.
And I’m going to show you in the dashboard, where it breaks it all down of like, what was I working on, or, you know, whatever. So you can see that and an opportunity to see timesheets and stuff, which is really great. So you can see how many hours people worked on which day, and I’ll show you that in a minute.
So I’m just having the timer run right now, you can just leave this running, go and do what you have to do, come back, turn it off, if you forgot to turn it off, you can edit the time, you know, to say like, “Hey, it wasn’t five hours, it was only one hour.” And you can, you can add a note as if you know, to it just like I showed you.
So that’s the time tracking for the tasks. Now, what I was going to show is that if time tracking and time estimates are important, in the list view, you can create the custom fields to show those times. If that’s important, you know, if you want to see that as soon as you open it up versus having to open up the task, you can set those custom fields here just by putting on the plus sign, and then selecting fields. And then obviously, they’re already selected. So I don’t need to do that.
But from this list, I can select the different fields that I want included to be all along the top here. And then I’ll just show you in board view what this will look like. So you can see the estimated time here. And if we have the box view open, this is what that would look like. I don’t typically use the box view. This is not something that I typically use but it’s obviously there for you. In the calendar view them, I didn’t give them due dates or so let me give them let me assign them to me really quick.
All right. So now you can see here, it tells us the track time, it tells us the estimated time and I didn’t set that up on blog number six. But you can see how you can view that here, which is really great. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to go ahead and swap over to the dashboard and I have pulled one second.
Okay, so for the time reporting, what I did is I created a new dashboard, and then I added the widgets. So let’s go to editing. I added the widgets from time tracking. So you have time reporting time sheet, billable report time estimated and then the time tracked. So what I’m pulling is time reporting, and timesheet, and here we have time reporting. And you can set the filters where it says grouping.
So this is folder first then list and you can add tags and things like that. The thing I want to point out most is just the grouping option. So this is folder then list. So that’s what this looks like. So folder, one of our clients or content management, and then list is going to be the weekly calls. And the list is blog production. So then we can see where that’s located. And then if we do time reporting, and we do list then task. We’re going to see list and then we’re going to see task.
So we see the list that it’s in and then we see the tasks so this was the main task and then all the sub tasks. And really quickly I want to point out So we have the estimated time, the track time. And this is where about, I don’t know, I’d say like, once a month, usually sometimes twice a month, we will look at how closely we are matching our track time with our estimated time, and then adjust or find out why things are taking longer than they need to, not need to, but why they’re taking longer than we had anticipated.
And figure out okay, so is this a special case? Was it just this one time that this took longer? Or is this something that’s going to continue to take longer? And so then we can gauge? You know, how many of one thing you know, how many blogs can someone do in one day, if it takes, you know, right now it’s looking like six hours to do, so is that something and how many people do we have working on it, if it’s more than one, and maybe it’s only taking each person one hour or you know, maybe each person two hours, they can probably do more than one in a day. So now we’re that’s how we really use that estimated track time. And we do a review of it, like I said about once a month to make sure that we’re we’re matching them.
In the beginning, we were not matched at all. And it does take time to figure out how long, you know, is the expected time that these take and then also understanding that sometimes it’s not always, you know, you have random times when it might take longer than other times so. But if you can get it consistent, that you’re close, it will help with your resource management, for sure.
Okay, so then we’re looking at the list and then the task. And then we’re looking at the filter, which is the user and list. And we might even do, we could do user and task, I can hit save on this. And then it’s going to show me because that’s who I filtered it out, so it’d be me. And then if I click this down, it’s going to show me the tasks that I worked on.
So now you can see the estimated time to work. And then I can even click these down if I added notes to any of those. So you know, I did add a note to one of them. So there it is, this was the last piece. And then you know, you can see the notes that I’ve added here. And I didn’t add any notes to those. But then you can see each time I started and stopped it, there’s no notes, that’s each time that I entered the time manually or started stopped the timer. So you can also see that then the timesheet is really great, because now I can see total time to work for the week. So I just set it for this week.
But depending on how often you pay people, you might want to look at the full month or every two weeks or whatever. And then it’s showing when I’ve tracked the time. So if I click on this, it’s going to open up, it’s going to expand the different tasks that I worked on or check time in. So now you can see what day I worked on it, how long I worked on it. And you can even open this up even more. And you can see if I added notes to that you can see when I started and stop the timer. So this gets really really granular. And really fantastic for when you’re managing a team and trying to track their time and things like that, and efficiency.
So something that we do about once a year is we track our own time, Janine and I to figure out what we’re doing, and what are we spending our time on. And I highly recommend doing something like that. It is tedious, to not just track your time when you’re working, but like track your time and what you’re doing all day long to figure out where you may need, you know, where you could move things around, and where you could be working more efficiently, things like that. But the ability to track inside of ClickUp makes it really, really easy.
And it’s associated with specific tasks and things like that. That’s also why it’s really important to get the tasks in ClickUp having tasks in ClickUp, a place for people to track their time is really important. Otherwise, there’s really no place for them to track time.
If something pops up, and it’s not already a task in ClickUp, Janine or I will make the task for the person or they’ll make it for themselves and just make a note like, I’m making this task to complete this thing, and then they’ll track their time in there.
But anyway, I really think this is a fantastic tool. I think the time estimates and the track time are both valuable and really important. What I would do in the very beginning is I would start by having your team track their time, even if you let’s say you pay them you know the same amount every month or something you know a retainer or something like that. I would still want to know how long those things typically take in your business. And I would ask them to track their time, you know, maybe for two weeks or three weeks, but if you are paying them hourly, obviously you want them to track their time.
So, I hope that I hope that was helpful. Again, my name is Amalie. I’m with Systematic Excellence Consulting. And make sure you subscribe, check out our other videos. And if you have any questions, feel free to leave those in the comments. All right, thank you so much. I look forward to see you next time.
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