Back in May I explained that I was having a month or so long trial of using ClickUp alongside UpNote in a toolset that I had called ClickUpNote. See what I did there? I was moving from ToDoist in a tool stack called UpNotionoist as I had UpNote for notes, Notion for longer term planning, managing content and projects and ToDoist for tasks. So, To ClickUp or Todiost – that was the question and this is the verdict.
I have stopped using ClickUp.
I am back to UpNote, Notion and ToDoist.
Ultimately I want to say that I do love ClickUp. It is an app with so many things that I love, and (as I said in my previous post here) having everything in one place is a real plus point.
How did I use ClickUp?
I used ClickUp entirely by myself and so a lot of the features didn’t really fit with my use case – therefore bear that in mind. I had a general space which contained, amongst a few other things, my Master project list. I used this to plan the status of the projects and schedule days to focus on a specific project. I had a ‘space’ for each area of life, such as work or family, and in that space I had folders and lists for my projects and lists for my areas of focus. So within family I would have an area list of Home & Admin and project list of digitising our files, for example. The project tasks in the master project list were linked to the tasks in the specific list for that project via dependencies. I used a custom field for Carl Pullein’s Time Sector System.
I used Docs for a lot of the work I needed to do for various projects, before anything formal was required – these could be housed in or linked to the project task in the master project list, or the specific project task list.
I had a content management system within ClickUp as well, using different statuses, boards and views.
UpNote remained for notes not related to projects, for archiving all of my project work to keep ClickUp uncluttered and for writing in.
I am sure I have explained this badly but on paper it was amazing. Once it was all set up (imagine what it would take to set this all up in Notion and then cut into a quarter and you will be about right) I was pretty excited and as I looked at it and tried it out, it was clear that this was the set up for me. It was amazing.
If it was THAT good – why stop?
Because it only worked well on paper. It only worked in theory. I have ClickUp 3.0 now. I have had it for a few weeks. Though the significant speed improvements are still on the yet to be released list.
And speed is probably the biggest issue.
When you click on a list or a view, it takes a noticeable amount of time to load everything, and depending on how long a list you have, it won’t load it all. Navigate away or collapse a segment of your list and then come back or ‘un-collapse’ it and you have to wait again.
When you check off a task, especially if it is recurring, how long it takes ClickUp to deal with it varies. Sometimes, I had to navigate away from my list and back for the task to vanish. It would be checked off, it would just sit there marked complete.
Using some of the more complicated keyboard shortcuts required a noticeable amount of time for them to action.
All of this little friction adds up to make the experience frustrating.
The next problem is that Docs, formulas and views etc are powerful in ClickUp but each of these things is more powerful, more intuitive and faster to use within Notion. In a sense, the frustration is knowing that you could do something in Notion, that it would work much quicker and that Notion is free and ClickUp would be about £60+ year when the price increases at my renewal. Why am I paying for something that is less good than something that is free?
And lastly, I am still not 100% sure about ClickUp’s capture methods. Using ClickUp introduces a few different way of capturing tasks and they in effect all do a very a very similar things, but that cannot all be used in the same way. You have an in app shortcut and a global shortcut to create a new task. But this doesn’t go anywhere by default and so you have to choose where it goes. In the app, you can press ‘n’ to bring up the notepad and take quick notes that can then be turned to a task or a doc. But you can only do this in the app. You could also press ‘r’ to create a reminder that goes straight to the top of your today list in your home screen. On top of that you have an inbox for chat messages and notifications. This feels a bit like having 3 additional inboxes to process – notepad, home screen and inbox.
Ultimately, I could work out that last point and with enough time, figure out how to capture stuff in the way that best suited me. Ultimately, I’d learn ClickUp and play to its strengths rather than trying to make it work like Notion. But the speed issues, the need to sometimes ‘refresh and reload’ things for changes to take effect – this is why I stopped. Organising ClickUp when I did my daily and weekly and monthly planning, with having everything in one place promising to simplify the process, actually took roughly 3 times as long as doing across 3 apps )UpNote, ToDoist and Notion).
And so, I have stopped using ClickUp.
To ClickUp or ToDoist? That was the question. ToDoist – that is the answer.
