Note: unusually for me, this post contains affiliate links. I am just some guy that ClickUp have never heard of, but they made it very easy to set up (as with everything else), so here you go.
I’ve cycled through a lot of to-do list and productivity apps (trello, Jira, ProjectGantt, excel spreadsheets and googledocs, index cards, a brief flirtation with GTD and even, once-upon-a-time, a filofax), but none of them actually fixed me. For a long time I thought Asana might be the one, but the key features I needed – calendars and timelines – were locked behind their paywall, and $15 a month was too much to pay.*
Enter ClickUp [affiliate link], who are having a bit of a marketing push at the moment. I’ve only been using it for a few days, gradually entering to-do list items and experimenting with how you can order tasks, but it really does seem that they’ve thought of everything:
Key for me are the following:
- Almost everything is included in the free version, including calendar, timeline and gantt-chart** modes with working dependencies;
- A hierarchy with the right number of levels – Spaces, Folders, Lists, Tasks, and Sub-tasks (which, crucially, can have checklists inside them);
- The ability to change tasks, reassign sub-tasks and generally shuffle things around – including multiple items at once – from any view;
- The ability to make tasks appear in multiple to do lists (e.g. a task that lives in a Finance list can also appear in your “High-Priority” list in a different space;
- The ability to have multiple statuses for tasks (noted, queued, priority, done);
- Lots of (unlimited?) customisable tags and fields;
- The ability to filter or organise all the views by just about all of those fields;
- Price – at $5 per user per month for the first paid tier, with a further discount for non-profits, it’s positioned so that a few days in I’m already leaning towards paying for it.
This video – about all the different ways you can view and rearrange your calendar – says everything you need to know about the level of thought they’ve put into things.
What are you waiting for? Go and try ClickUp [it’s that affiliate link again]. It’s great.
And in case I wasn’t clear, I think it’s better than Asana.
*$15 a seat for Asana is a no-brainer if you’re a business or freelancer, but if you’re just some dude at just some non-profit, it adds up.
**Which autocorrect wants to replace with “gantlet-chart”, which I presume is a miniature species.