The All-in-One Digital Tool That Replaced Multiple Other Tools

In January 2022 I decided to take the leap and become self-employed. This has been the biggest learning curve of my life.

When you start on your own, you have to make many choices in a short time. You have to learn all sorts of new skills like accounting, website creation, bookkeeping software, etc.

I was fairly overwhelmed. Not so much with learning many new skills, that was fun and rewarding. But I was overwhelmed with choice.

What project management software to use? What emailing platform to use? What bookkeeping software to install? Where to collect files? And the list continues.

If you have been through this process, you know what I mean.

Strategic decision-making is hugely important, especially when time is money. As a self-employed, you're no longer receiving that weekly or monthly pay check. Your financial safety net is gone.

But also as an established business, you don't want to waste considerable time and effort learning and implementing a new digital tool. Only to find it doesn't suit your business.

Each misstep in your choice of tools drains your finances and consumes your time and energy.

The journey of setting up, learning and after that leaving a tool that falls short can be super frustrating.

Hopefully, this article can help guide you in the right direction when it comes to project and team management.

The Everything App For Work

One day while doing research, a piece of well-written copy caught my eye. It said: “One app to replace them all”.

That copy was written on the website of ClickUp. It’s officially a project management tool but it was promoting a lot more ways to use it.

I decided to test it out and I was impressed. The tool brought me clarity and less overwhelm.

I've used the tool in several different ways in my small technical business, and it might be suited for your operation too. You can use it in the following ways to streamline your operations:

Day to Day tasks management

ClickUp lets you break down projects into manageable tasks. Per task you can:

• Set a start date
• Set deadlines
• Assign priorities
• Track progress

You can also add sub-tasks to the task to break down the task into even smaller steps. This all helps to make sure you complete the projects you work on within the pre determined timeframe.

CRM system

With Custom Fields you can create unique tasks fields to collect and manage:

• Client name
• Client role
• Email address
• Phone number

And actually any other detail you want to add. By setting up different statuses, you can track leads as they move through your sales pipeline.

Project Management

ClickUp has many visualisation features to help you track project progress. Some of them are:

• List view to track tasks, people and progress
• Board (Kanban) view to move tasks between columns
• Calendar view to plan and schedule tasks
• Gantt view to plan dependencies and time

These features let everyone stay in the loop about what needs to be done. It shows who's doing what and how projects are moving forward without switching between apps.

Team Management

If you work together with team members on projects, ClickUp has very handy collaboration tools:

• You can assign tasks to the right person
• You can use the chat feature to discuss subjects without needing another app like Slack
• The workload feature lets you visualise team capacity
• Everyone can receive updates on the project's progress

These features let everyone stay in the loop about what needs to be done, who's doing what and how projects are moving forward without switching between apps.

Project and Business Information Centre

The ClickUp Docs let you create documents and let’s you connect them to tasks. Documents like:

• SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures)
• Project Charters
• Product or machine manuals
• Training or onboarding materials

The fact you can link documents to tasks is super handy as a manager. You create a task → assign the right person to the task → link the right documentation to the task making sure the team member is equipped with all the information they need to complete the task successfully.

Time Tracking for Hourly Jobs

With the time tracking feature, you can collect important data:

• You can estimate how long tasks will take
• You can track how long the tasks actually take
• You can compare the time estimated with how long it took
• You can label the time billable and calculate the cost of completing the task

This is particularly useful for billing clients accurately and managing time.

Quality Assurance

ClickUp can help with making sure the right quality is met:

• Add checklists to tasks and sub-tasks
• Link the right manuals or SOPs to the tasks
• Create approval steps to make sure important tasks meet quality standards
• Use the task comment section to easily give feedback on task progress and quality

This process promotes consistency and high-quality project delivery. It also allows you to spot problems early because you can track each step of the process.

ClickUp AI

Also better known as ClickUp Brain, helps to speed up the completion of all sorts of tasks:

• Let it search for any information
• Let it summarise the progress made in a certain period
• Let it suggest the next tasks to complete the project
• Let it help you write text in documents or within tasks

The AI helps you to work much faster and more accurately by automating repetitive tasks. It provides also intelligent suggestions for content and workflow improvements.

This list just scratches the surface of what ClickUp can do. The platform offers a lot of other features and capabilities. Like automated workflows, custom dashboards, goal tracking and more.

One of the biggest advantages of ClickUp is that it can replace many individual digital tools that you might be using now. This can save a lot of time switching between digital tools and a lot of money on software subscriptions.

Is The Tool Right For You?

When I discovered ClickUp, I was super impressed. I straight away moved all my information and operations over from Notion to ClickUp. Because it can do it all!

After using it for a while for all my operations, I started to notice that I missed the flexibility of Notion a little bit.

For folks who don't know what Notion is, it's a flexible digital workspace that lets you create custom databases, wikis and project management systems.

I’m a digital man. I don’t like paperwork. And I love playing around with digital tools. It’s my version of playing video games.

Notion has a lot of little building blocks you can use to create a system that's unique to you.

I’m fully aware that for other people that is pretty overwhelming to do. Because it takes time to learn what features there are in Notion and how to use them.

Now, I’m using Notion for knowledge capture and writing content. And use ClickUp for managing large projects.

So, is ClickUp the right tool for you?

If you:

• Need to manage medium to large sized projects
• Have many team members that work on the same project
• Don’t have the desire to play around with building blocks yourself
• Would like one solid operational system that replaces many other apps

I highly recommend introducing ClickUp into your operations. It’s a great tool.

If you:

• Need to manage small to medium sized projects
• Have just you or 1 or 2 team members working on the same project
• Love playing around with digital tool features like I do
• Would like a flexible operational system that you can change to your situation

I would recommend using Notion for your operations.

It is fair to say that you need a project management system in your operation. If you don’t use the handy tools that are out there and your competitors are, they have a big advantage over you.

It gives just so much clarity. It’s super easy to collaborate with team members. And you are just so much more organised which will impress the clients too.

You can start working with the tool for free. If you need more features you can upgrade to a paid version (still not expensive).

If you need help with introducing a project management tool into your business, feel free to reach out!

Action Points

Here are the key action points to take away:

• Evaluate if you need a tool like ClickUp
• If you do, introduce it into your operation
• Use tutorials they provide to learn the tool
• Use the tool to track tasks, deadlines and progress
• Track time spent on tasks to bill clients accurately
• Store important documents and SOPs that you can link to tasks
• Use built-in quality control features like checklists and approval steps
• Consider using AI features to speed up repetitive tasks

Having a proper project management system makes working in this industry with limited budgets and tight deadlines a bit easier,. Plus it helps impress clients with how organised you are.