How To Use ClickUp To Organize Your Course Content

The one brilliant thing about ClickUp is the flexibility you have in how you structure and work with your data. Like if Trello (and all of its related add-ons, power-ups, extensions) and Asana had a baby. I’m going to show you how I set things up, why I did it that way, if other options exist, and the pros/cons of different options.

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Structure

I made a folder and created a single list for course content. I did a folder because I had other lists that contained other course-related tasks and wanted to be able to view this data in a certain way, especially seeing just content tasks vs all tasks - the easiest way to accomplish this is with lists inside a folder.

There is nothing to stop you from putting this info in its own space instead of a folder. You could also combine everything into 1 list, but I would recommend keeping the standard module content separate because that’s your course map that will stay static and that you’ll come back to over and over again.

Tasks

I set up each module and lesson as individual tasks. You could set up the main tasks for the modules only, and then sub-tasks are the lessons in each module, and then sub-sub-tasks as the tasks for each lesson - I find too many nested levels of tasks confusing (part of the reason why I don’t love Asana), so I wanted to be consistent and not have to worry about what is content (a task) and what has to be done for that content (a sub-task). 

Another good way to differentiate these is to add the module or lesson cover photo to the task.

Subtasks

Subtasks are for all of the actual detailed to-dos that have to be completed for each piece of content. 

For example, for each module I need to: write title, write description, create image, add to Kajabi, etc.; for each video lesson I need to: write title and description, outline learning/talking points, create slides; record lessons, add to Kajabi, etc. 

You could use checklists for this instead, but I prefer subtasks because checklists have limited functionality - you can’t give a due date or a status for a checklist item. I need due dates to live :)

Statuses

My course content list has unique statuses based on the main stages I need to hit from idea → completion: To Do, Doing, Blocked, Content Complete, Uploaded to Site. 

These cover the initial creation process, but since I’m also using these to manage the content in the future, there are additional statuses for Needs Update and Archived. Archived is the status that is considered “Closed” while Uploaded to Site is “Done”. 

Since the default state is for closed tasks to be hidden, I don’t want to consider any of my main tasks closed even if the content is complete because they represent informational content rather than just to-dos, and could be tweaked or adjusted later. You can control how closed tasks appear so you don’t have to do it this way, it’s just my preference. 

I also like having stages set up as statuses because I could have different people working on different stages, so completing a status can send a notification to other people that your work is done and they can start their part.

Due Dates

In the most recent course, I was creating the content for each module as I delivered it week-by-week, so the main task (module or lesson) would have a start and due date for that particular week, and the sub-tasks would have individual due dates throughout the week to break things up into manageable chunks. 

I like this because I can toggle between showing/hiding subtasks in order to see a high-level schedule on the calendar view vs a detailed breakdown of what needs to be done each day. 

If I was creating all of the content before launching a course, I’d probably set up the due dates across all of the modules/lessons to batch similar content - so write the titles and descriptions for all lessons at one time, create header images for all lessons at one time, etc. 

This is less stressful, but there is a risk: if you haven’t done really good planning ahead of time, you might get part way through creation and realize that you need to go back and change something you already completed.

Let me give you an example: when I was outlining a lesson I realized that some of the content was too similar to a lesson from a previous module. So because I hadn’t batched all of the writing/images, I could just make the change in the moment and didn’t have to go back to remake images and change things in Kajabi.

Tags

I wanted to be able to create a Trello-board-like view so I could see a high-level layout of all of the content regardless of what status it was in. Once the course is complete this becomes the permanent dashboard of my course layout. 

To do this, I created tags for each module i.e. ‘module 1’ ‘module 2’ so I can group by tags and the modules/lessons for each tag display in columns. I could have also used a custom field for this, which I think I would do going forward. No particular reason why, I just like custom fields better :)

Templates

Once I knew all of the info and subtasks that were needed for modules and lessons I made templates - every to do that had to be completed was included as a sub-task that got checked off as the content moved through the stages.

There were custom fields for info that was important to reference on a regular basis: google drive folder link where everything was stored, direct edit link to the content in Kajabi, etc.

And in the description were temporary links that I needed access to when initially creating the content such as image and presentation templates.

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