One of the perils of using a highly customisable tool like ClickUp is that you can fall into the trap of customising too much!

If you’re using a ClickUp list to keep track of a process, it can be tempting to match your task statuses to each part of your process.

Let’s take content management for example. You have a list of blogs in ClickUp and you want to track them through a simple process that has these stages:

• Draft
• Review
• Publish
• Promote

You might be tempted to change your statuses on that list to match those stages – like this:

Then you have a task for each blog on the list and you can work them through those phases.

Sounds simple enough… until this happens:

• You want to add something to that list that isn’t strictly a blog (this will happen – no matter how disciplined you are) – therefore these statuses don’t apply
• You start adding in subtasks for each of your blogs.

The with these statuses is that they will apply to both parent tasks and subtasks.

So, while you want the parent task to track through those particular stages, none of those might apply to your subtasks.

See this example here – I’ve got a blog that I particularly want to run past a friend for some input, but the subtask for that has all the same stages as the blog, which is annoying because I just want to mark the subtask as done:

The available statuses make no sense in context of the subtask.

Do this instead

Keep your statuses as simple as possible:

• To Do
• Doing
• Done

Or some variation of that.

Then create a custom field in the list to capture the stages of your process and update those instead.

There are lots of ways to do this, I like to go via adding a column:

Then I’d go for a label field, call it Blog Stages and add all the steps as a different option:

(You can even choose the colours too!)

Once you press add column you can see your new field ready to use. (You can click and drag to reorder columns in a list).

Now you can track the blogs through each process step through that new custom field column, and keep it clear whether your tasks behind each blog are in progress or not:

Better!

You can even group the list by your new custom field instead of status:

So keep your statuses simple, and use custom fields for your process stages instead!