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Ever find yourself drowning in recurring tasks, wondering whether you’ve completed them or need to tackle them again? You’re not alone. These repetitive tasks can drain your mental energy and consume valuable time—time you could be dedicating to growing your business.
Now, imagine if your recurring tasks were automated, appearing exactly when needed without any manual input. No more forgotten deadlines or endless to-do lists—just a streamlined system that keeps your business running efficiently.
By leveraging automation in ClickUp, you can eliminate mental clutter, improve productivity, and focus on what truly matters.
Why Automate?
You might think that automating your recurring tasks feels impersonal, but consider this: every minute spent on manual, repetitive work is time stolen from more creative, business-growing activities. From client follow-ups to content creation workflows and payment reminders, automating these recurring tasks can liberate hours in your schedule.
Automation in ClickUp allows you to streamline your recurring tasks, ensuring consistency and efficiency in your workflow. By setting up recurring tasks in ClickUp, you gain a structured system that keeps your business running smoothly without constant manual input.
How to Set Up Recurring Tasks in ClickUp
Now, let’s dive into the practical steps for setting up recurring tasks in ClickUp.
Identify Your Recurring Tasks: Start by listing all the tasks that you repeatedly perform. Having a central repository of recurring tasks ensures nothing slips through the cracks.
Set Up Recurrence in ClickUp: When creating a new task, mark the first due date, then navigate to the “Set Recurring” tab. Here, you can adjust the frequency—daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly—to fit your needs.
Customize Recurrence Settings: ClickUp allows you to define whether a task repeats based on a specific date, day of the week, or even after completion.
For example, if you need to review last month’s data on the first day of each new month, set it to recur monthly on that date. ClickUp’s flexible recurrence settings allow you to automate task repetition exactly as needed.
Customizing Recurring Tasks for Maximum Efficiency
ClickUp provides extensive customization options to tailor recurring tasks to your workflow:
Task Descriptions & Subtasks: You can choose whether to duplicate descriptions and subtasks or start fresh. If a task has unique subtasks each time, avoid duplication. But for routine processes, duplicating subtasks ensures consistency.
Time Estimation: Assigning time estimates to recurring tasks helps with scheduling and prevents small tasks from spiraling into time-consuming black holes.
When setting up recurring tasks in ClickUp, one key decision is whether the task should simply adjust its due date or generate a completely new task each cycle.
While updating the due date might seem like the simpler option, creating a new task each time is often the better approach. Why? Because it keeps your task history clean—avoiding clutter from old comments, completed checklists, and outdated discussions. With separate task entries, tracking progress and reviewing past completions becomes much easier.
By setting up your recurring tasks strategically, you’ll ensure your workflow remains smooth, organized, and efficient—allowing you to focus on higher-priority work.
Scheduling Recurring Tasks: Best Practices
One essential strategy when working with recurring tasks is selecting “recurring tasks on schedule.” This ensures that tasks regenerate based on a set schedule, rather than requiring completion before they repeat—a common workflow pitfall.
By using this method, you guarantee that your tasks appear exactly when needed, keeping your workflow seamless and predictable.
Building Business Habits with Recurring Tasks
Pairing recurring tasks with structured business routine templates can significantly enhance efficiency. By setting up templates for repeatable processes, you eliminate decision fatigue and create consistency in task execution.
With ClickUp automating your recurring tasks, guesswork disappears. Teams stay aligned, deadlines are met, and project management becomes effortless.
Conclusion: Stay on Track with Recurring Tasks in ClickUp
Incorporating recurring tasks into your ClickUp workflow is a game-changer for productivity and efficiency. Embracing automation is not just about gaining extra time—it’s about shifting focus to high-impact, strategic work.
As your recurring tasks run on autopilot, you’ll experience increased clarity, reduced stress, and a more organized approach to business management.
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Video Transcription:
Yvonne Heimann [00:00:00]:
Ever feel like you keep forgetting those repetitive tasks and you’re just drowning into them? Like oh my God, did I do this? Didn’t I do this? Do I have to do this again? Did I? What? How? Where? The brain power that repetitive tasks take from us is literally just eating away on productivity. So just imagine how simple and easy your ClickUp could be when it can just remind you and have it on your to do list automatically that you are supposed to be doing this repetitive task every day, every week, every month, maybe even just one of these annual tasks like filing your taxes. Nobody wants to do that. However, it always seems to be sneaking up on us and we never do it on time. And if we haven’t met yet. I’m Yvonne Heimann. I am a business efficiency consultant and verified ClickUp consultant since 2018 and I’m all about simplifying systems and automating recurring tasks. Now why should we even automate? You know, it kind of feels like impersonal.
Yvonne Heimann [00:01:02]:
But honestly, every minute you spend on manual repeatable tasks is not just minutes, sometimes even hours just stolen from what you’re supposed to be doing in your business. And that’s growing it, showing up for it, enjoying it. Those could be tasks like client follow up. Oh my God. That client ended their contract with us and was all happy three months ago and we never followed up with them. Content creation workflows. Getting into the habit of creating short form in YouTube videos so you’re not last minute. Oh my God.
Yvonne Heimann [00:01:35]:
I haven’t posted on my stories in ages. Been there, done that. Things like invoice and payment reminders when your credit card bill is due or your electricity bill is due. Yes, you can automate that too. There’s a space for that in ClickUp. And as you can see we even have a specific list in our admin space for business routines. Tasks that we do over and over and over again. You can also set these up in your client onboarding or wherever applicable for those general repeating admin tasks. Grab your business routine list.
Yvonne Heimann [00:02:10]:
If you haven’t snatched the template yet, I’ll link it below. We have that 5 must have ClickUp template which the admin space is one part of this. So let’s talk about how technically we set this up in in ClickUp. As you can see right now we have a couple complete and in progress tasks. All of these just have a single due date. Nothing has been done there. This is a standard task right in ClickUp. So when you were getting your recurring task set up, I recommend take half an Hour, get them all in here and then as they come up.
Yvonne Heimann [00:02:46]:
Oh, there’s another recurring task. Start pulling them in here so you can get them out of your head. Then when you have your monthly checkup and you have your first due date, go in your due date and choose the set recurring tab. There has a lot of settings happening in here. First off, your first initial due date is going to be the start of this recurring setting. Then you choose. Do you want a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly days after the first completion? For repeatable tasks like this, I recommend choosing your daily weekly monthly. In this case it’s a monthly on the same day each month.
Yvonne Heimann [00:03:31]:
On the last Monday, on the first day of the month, on the last day of the month. So you have some leeway here. If you are going by a specific day of the week or if you are going by a specific date, that number on your month. In this case, you know what, let’s do this on the first day of the month so we can look at the data from last month and accumulate those and get the data out. The question now is going to be do you want this specific recurring task to just change its due date, meaning it stays the same task and the due date just changes, or do you want to create a new task? Me personally, I prefer to create a new task because I want to see all of the different tasks. I don’t want to have all of the comments in it and all of that stuff. I want to be able to track the work we have done. So with this we are creating a new task and in the option sections, I don’t want to duplicate the comments that don’t need that.
Yvonne Heimann [00:04:33]:
I do want to duplicate the description. So Description is additional information to this task. Comments is where we have the conversation for the tasks. I don’t need to duplicate them because the conversation is based on the last task, not the upcoming one. Description yes, we want those Assignees. Yes, we want those Watchers can always be moved. Tags you need to decide. Same with subtasks.
Yvonne Heimann [00:04:57]:
If you have a monthly recurring task where you might add additional subtasks that are just applicable to one of the tasks, don’t duplicate them. If it’s a task template with specific steps in the subtask, duplicate them. We often keep custom fields. If you’re collecting data in the custom fields, do not duplicate them. Checklists we usually do. Same with the subtasks. Assignee and we want to remap the sub task dates and we’ll save that. How long do you want to recur this for? If this is just a quarterly thing, then just tell it to Repeat it for 5 times, 10 times, how often you ever want it, or if it’s indefinitely, check that box and do you want to update the status too? Now with creating a new task, it automatically would be to do.
Yvonne Heimann [00:05:49]:
You can always make double sure that it’s set to to do. Now here is one of the big things. Do not repeat it when it’s complete. What do I mean by that? When we recur a task in ClickUp and automate this recurring setting, it needs to be checked complete for this to happen. That means you need to make sure you always complete everything. What are the chances that 100% of the time you are going to mark things complete? Exactly. Guilty of that one too. With that, we always do recurring tasks on schedule, which means it doesn’t matter what you do, it doesn’t matter what I do, it doesn’t matter if it’s set complete.
Yvonne Heimann [00:06:32]:
It happens on the schedule. This new task will be generated monthly no matter what you do. And then you save it. And now you see you have this recurring task set right in ClickUp. It’s out of mind. It’s just going to recur and in this case inform Luby every single time this is due. Now I would also recommend with these to set a time estimate to really get a better understanding. Not hours, we want minutes on this one.
Yvonne Heimann [00:07:07]:
There we go. To really get an understanding and get the time blocked out for these recurring tasks. Because how often do we have it as, oh, it’s just gonna take five minutes and five hours later, we are still in the middle of everything. Building recurring tasks within ClickUp can be really this simple. And stacking it with your business routine list really allows you to have less of this mental clutter. You don’t have to constantly think about it. It is right in there. Especially if you add your time estimates to those recurring tasks too.
Yvonne Heimann [00:07:42]:
You’re not going to run into this, did I do this? Didn’t I do this? When do I need to do this? When does this do? When does this has to happen? You don’t have to think about it anymore because you know it’s in clicker. You are also now able to really build more of this consistent habit of doing the thing that regularly has to happen. Just like we talked about in our habit tracker. Those habits, those recurring tasks, those recurring things that have to happen in your business now easily can become a habit and become second nature. You’re going to become so much more consistent and it is for smoother teamwork because you see what your team is up to. You know exactly what you are up to, everybody knows what’s going on and what has to happen. Pop in the comment section. I want to hear how you are going to use recurring tasks to make your life easier.
Yvonne Heimann [00:08:34]:
And if you are curious about even more productivity hacks in ClickUp, check out my five ClickUp Customization Hacks where I show you just how to supercharge your productivity even further. And until next time, keep automating and thriving. I’ll see you in the next video.
