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Are you constantly recreating the same tasks, subtasks, and checklists in ClickUp every time you onboard a client, launch a product, or publish a new YouTube video? If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone.
Many business owners spend countless hours setting up the same steps over and over again because they haven’t created a ClickUp template that does the work for them.
When you’re managing projects, clients, or content, repeating the same setup can quietly eat away at your productivity.
Every duplicate checklist, every manually assigned due date, and every “copy-paste” workflow adds up to hours that could have been spent on revenue-generating work or actual creative tasks.
That’s why learning how to create a ClickUp template is one of the simplest ways to reclaim your time and scale with ease. And in this video, Yvi walks through how to build a ClickUp task templates from start to finish, and how her team use at Ask Yvi.
You’ll learn how to design templates that make your business run like clockwork, avoid common setup mistakes, and adapt your processes as your needs evolve.
By the end, you’ll have everything you need to create repeatable systems that help you stop managing chaos and start managing growth.
Why ClickUp Templates are a Game Changer
If you feel bogged down by repetitive setups or manual project creation, you’re not the problem—your system is. As Yvonne Heimann says, “repeating those same setups over and over and over again is a huge time waster.”
Whether you’re managing client projects, publishing YouTube videos, or building digital products, a ClickUp template ensures every step is ready to go before you even start. Instead of building from scratch, your task, subtasks, checklists, and custom fields are all pre-loaded, letting you jump straight into action.
With a well-designed ClickUp template, you can spend less time managing tools and more time doing work that actually moves your business forward.
How to Build Your First ClickUp Template
Step 1: Start Simple and Build as You Go
Every great ClickUp template begins with simplicity. Yvonne recommends starting with a basic workflow that captures every step in your process. Use pen and paper or start directly inside ClickUp, and don’t worry about perfection. Templates are meant to evolve as your business grows.
For example, the Ask Yvi team’s YouTube video template includes:
Editing the video
Creating graphics with a checklist for each required image
Uploading to CastMagic with notes to clean up the transcript
Setting preliminary due dates that will later be remapped automatically
Once your structure is ready, save the template inside ClickUp. If you already have a project built out, you can convert it into a ClickUp task template and choose which parts to include, keeping only what’s relevant for future reuse.
Step 2: Name and Generalize Your Template
When naming your ClickUp template, keep it broad enough to reuse. For example, call it “Video Template” instead of “Video 34” or “Client A Onboarding.” Add default assignees, due dates, and notes that apply to every project so you don’t have to adjust them each time.
Sharing and Updating Your ClickUp Templates
ClickUp makes it easy to control who can access your templates. You can keep them private, share them with your team, or make them public if you want to sell or share them outside your business, just like Yvonne does in her ClickUp Template Shop.
ClickUp templates follow a hierarchy:
Task Template: Saves task information
List Template: Saves all tasks within a list
Folder Template: Keeps lists and tasks together
Space Template: Saves an entire workspace setup
When your workflow changes, you can easily update your ClickUp template. Just select “update existing template” so every new task uses the improved version.
Automating Template Application in ClickUp
Creating templates saves time, but adding ClickUp automations multiplies that benefit. As Yvonne explains, “We don’t apply it manually because we have an automation that does it automatically for us.”
With ClickUp automations, you can apply your ClickUp task template the moment a task is created, no extra clicks needed. Imagine assigning roles, adding due dates, and inserting subtasks automatically when a new client or project starts. It’s a simple way to scale your operations while staying organized.
Best Practices for Every ClickUp Template
Add Time Estimates
Include time estimates for each task and subtask. This helps you see how much time each project will take and plan your week more accurately.Use Relative Due Dates
Set due dates relative to the main task so when your main due date moves, all subtasks automatically adjust.Include Everything Repeatable
If you do something more than twice, add it to your ClickUp template—checklists, fields, or attachments.Keep It Simple
Use one strong template and delete the steps you don’t need for a specific project instead of creating multiple versions.
Adapting Your ClickUp Templates as You Grow
A ClickUp template isn’t a fixed system—it should grow with you. Start with one core process, get it working, and update it as your workflow evolves.
When you create a new task from your template, ClickUp prompts you to remap due dates and subtasks automatically. With relative due dates enabled, everything schedules itself around your chosen timeline. As Yvonne shows, “We never start from scratch.”
Build ClickUp Templates and Reclaim Your Time
A well-built ClickUp template can save you hours every week and bring clarity to how you manage your business. Whether it’s for onboarding clients, producing content, or launching offers, templates let you focus on results instead of repetitive setup.
Start with one workflow and build from there. Each template becomes a building block toward a smoother, more scalable business.
ready to take action and stop trying to figure it all out on your own?
You don’t have to do it all – or all by yourself.
I have helped many Digital Entrepreneurs scale their operations, teams, and offers!
Let’s get you to that next level.
Video Transcription:
Yvonne Heimann [00:00:00]:
If you are tired of manually recreating the same task and subtasks and checklists over and over and over in ClickUp, I’ve got a solution for you. Whether you’re managing your client projects, you’re launching a new product, or you are publishing YouTube videos, repeating those same setups over and over and over again is a huge time waster. So today I’m going to show you how we create task templates in ClickUp that do the heavy lifting for us so you can do it too. I’ll cover how templates can save us hours and hours every single week, and how to include everything from subtasks to checklists to custom fields, and how to make this process scalable no matter what kind of work you do. To make this really super practical, I’ll walk you through our actual YouTube video process template as a real world example. That’s what we use for me to still weekly create YouTube videos while I’m digital nomading and never really know where I’m going to be next week. Think about it. Whether you are onboarding a new client, launching a new product, or you’re publishing that YouTube video, these are steps you repeat every single time.
Yvonne Heimann [00:01:16]:
Why not let ClickUp handle that for you? Let’s get into the nitty gritty. Here is how you create a task template in ClickUp that has everything you need. Now when we look at this, you can always already see that we have a lot of tasks and subtasks already in here. And that’s exactly what I want you to do. Create a task, call it test task, whatever you want to do, and build out your workflow. And if you’ve been around, if you’re just starting out, you know, take just pen and paper, get it out of your head, then get it in here. And that’s exactly how we start the process, by getting this in here. And I want you to get everything in here that you can come up up with.
Yvonne Heimann [00:02:02]:
It doesn’t have to be perfect. This has been a work in progress. We didn’t start out with a template this big and if you don’t want to start out like that, we have a template shop for you now with this, as you can see, we have our edit video in there. We have graphics in here where we have the checklist underneath for our three images. We need, we have upload to Cast Magic with the note of you need to clean up the transcript. Everything we need is in here as well as the due dates. We’ll get into this later on too. Again, you’ll want to have your preliminary due date.
Yvonne Heimann [00:02:37]:
So when you set up the template, just choose dates pretty much by duration. The main task due date is when is this whole thing due? When does this video need to be done and uploaded in YouTube and ready to go and scheduled for you to be on schedule. And then based on that, set the due dates behind. We’ll remap them later on. Now that we have this task already laid out with all the subtasks and all the things, you go into that task, find the template menu item and save as template. And as you already saw, there’s also your update as a template. Now we are saving this right here. And when you build out the template, build it out with all the things you do want to duplicate.
Yvonne Heimann [00:03:25]:
So you don’t need to customize it. Do you want to customize it? You can. So if you have an active task that you want to save as a template, you can do that. Simply customize your import items and choose what you want to import. When you’re building a fresh template, you shouldn’t need to have that. You just simply throw in only the information you want to use for the template, not the video specific one. So I wouldn’t call it Video abc, I would simply call it Video Template. Plug in all the due dates, plug in all the assignees, all the general information that applies for every single time I use the template.
Yvonne Heimann [00:04:06]:
And that way I don’t need to customize the import. Choose who gets access to it. If you are publicly sharing it like we do in our template shop, make it publicly available. You’re going to need the public link for this, or if you just want to use it yourself. Does every admin get access? Does every admin and guest and member get access? Simply choose who you want to be able to access this template and set it in share with and then just save the template. And that’s really how simple it is. Now, templates follow the ClickUp hierarchy, meaning you can save a task template and it saves all the task information. You can save a list template and it potentially saves the list with all of the tasks in it.
Yvonne Heimann [00:04:54]:
In the custom views, you can save a folder template, which then means the folder template keeps the list template and the task templates that are actively in there. Same with a space. That’s how easy it is. And if you want to pull this back up again, you edited this right in here. It’s a new template. You simply go into the three dots, find the template menu item again and say update existing template and you find the specific template you want to update. So for example, our template is called Ay, you can see it right here. Ay, those brackets tell me those are our internal templates because we also publicly sell templates, right? These are internal templates of Ask Yvi YouTube process.
Yvonne Heimann [00:05:41]:
And then our version history, we updated this and in 2024 and December, that’s where the version history comes from. So I easily can tell when we last saved it, choose who gets access to it, and then if you need to customize a customizer to choose what you want to save. And that’s really how simple it is to have a task template like this. Now from here you easily can apply a template and say add task for find that magic wand and browse your template and apply that Ask Yvi video template that we just talked about. Now you easily can manually apply the template. However, we actually don’t apply it because we have an automation going that does that automatically for us. However, that’s a whole nother beast. So if you want to see the full video of how we use our video stage to automatically apply our task template, simply comment automation down below and I’ll record the video for you.
Yvonne Heimann [00:06:47]:
So when we run this automation, we automatically apply the task template. We instantly get all the subtasks we need. You’ve already seen them in here, all the things that are happening everywhere, we get our assignees automatically. So my editor Lucas already knows that he has videos to edit and graphics to do. And Luby handles that the rest we also have used relative due dates. I mentioned that before, meaning based on the main task due date, when do the other things have to be done? So we are in timeline and that then gets remapped by the automation too. So everything automatically is scheduled with due dates to that specific video and when that video is due. And because everything is in this template, no matter if it’s subtask checklists, custom fields like publish date and video links, even attachment like thumbnails, we never start from scratch.
Yvonne Heimann [00:07:45]:
It is always right here it is ready to go. But here’s the best part. The exact workflow. This exact approach works for any other repeatable workflow. Just Simply swap out YouTube video for client onboarding or blog post or product launch. Whatever you do, this same process works over and over and over again. So let’s talk about some best practices. Is when creating your ClickUp templates, number one, add time estimates.
Yvonne Heimann [00:08:15]:
Include time estimates for each task and subtasks and make sure you have the ClickUp of time roll up on so that the Subtask estimate time rolls up into your main task so you can see how long do you need for video edit. See how long do we need to upload the video, how long do we need to repurpose the blog post, and all of those then add up into the main time estimate for the main task. That way you can really work on your work management and how much time do you have in planning your week? Best practice number two when creating ClickUp task templates is use relative due dates. So set your due dates as the main task being when everything needs to be done in scheduled and then x days before that we need to upload the video and x days before that the blog post needs to be done. So build this as relative due dates because that means we can remap those. Best practice number three for building and using ClickUp templates, is everything repeatable goes in. If you do something more than twice, put it in a template, subtask, checklist, attachments, you name it, put it in the template, it’s in the template, it’s easily duplicated, right? Best practice number four when creating and using templates and ClickUp is don’t overcomplicate it. If you need 80% of a template for a project, just delete the 20% you don’t need.
Yvonne Heimann [00:09:51]:
If the process is really similar, but you might not need that subtask, cool, just kick it off. If it’s a complete different process, like for example, graphic design versus video production, they are similar, but not similar enough. We duplicate it, we adjust the template, we apply each template separate. But you don’t really need to do that often. Often enough you can use a template that’s 80% or 90% right and you just delete the rest. Don’t create millions of versions of your ClickUp template. Let’s talk about using an adapting template. So you were, you are using your templates, you got your templates.
Yvonne Heimann [00:10:28]:
Now what? Whether you’re starting with a new project, a task or a piece of content, simply apply the template. ClickUp will prompt you to remap the tasks. So with that, when we have a test task in here and I go in here and simply say finding again templates, browse templates. It was actually right there, quick use. And we are bringing this in now. You can see we have subtasks and other things now what we do is we go in here, we go to whatever date it is and you see you change the task due date. Do you want to remap the other ones too? Yes. And look at the magic that happens and it happens over and over and over again and that’s pretty much what we are doing in the automation too.
Yvonne Heimann [00:11:24]:
So comment “automate” if you want to see the automation that takes care of all of this manually work too. You see everything was remapped. I didn’t even need to touch it simply because we have relative due dates in the template and change the main due dates for it to adjust. Now make sure you have due date remapping on in your click apps on or this will not work. Now remember, templates aren’t set in stone. You always can update them as your process evolves. We are regularly updating and Luby is already in my to do list to update our template already again. Start with one process, get it working and expand from there.
Yvonne Heimann [00:12:02]:
And if you want more tutorials on ClickUp automations and building workflows that actually work for you and not make you work more, make sure you subscribe to the channel and turn the notification on for for everything and let me know in the comment what’s the first process you are going to template right here in ClickUp. I’d love to hear what are you automating first. Now go build those templates and reclaim your time. I’ll see you in the next video.
