ClickUp’s Automation and Templates: How to improve efficiency at your workplace

Having a standard for the tasks that you need to complete or having to take fewer steps to update the status of your progress each day can significantly contribute to a better performance of the team as a whole.

Here is where ClickUp's automation and templates features come into play:

Automations

You know that feeling when you finish coding a feature and then spend 10 minutes manually moving cards around, updating assignees, and setting up the next handoff? Those context switches add up fast and break your flow state.

ClickUp's automations handle all that busywork for you. Set up rules once, and they'll automatically move tasks from your backlog to the current sprint, reassign completed work from development to QA, or schedule code review meetings when you mark something as ready.

During the course of a sprint, these small automations can save the team several hours that would otherwise be spent on administrative overhead. The setup is straightforward—no complex scripting required—and you can share your automations across different projects and workspaces.

Templates

We've all been there: you're tasked with implementing user authentication, and you start from scratch writing out requirements, acceptance criteria, and subtasks. Meanwhile, your colleague did the same thing last month but structured it completely differently.

Templates solve this by capturing your team's best practices in reusable formats. Whether it's a feature development template with all the standard subtasks (design review, implementation, unit tests, integration tests, documentation), or a bug report template that ensures you capture all the debugging info you need—templates eliminate the "blank page" problem.

Instead of reinventing the wheel each time, you start with a proven structure and customize from there. This means more comprehensive task breakdowns, consistent code review checklists, and fewer missed edge cases.

How these features improved our development workflow

The real game-changer has been managing our feature backlog. With long-running client projects, feature requests and bug reports can pile up quickly. Our automation system automatically sorts incoming work into the appropriate backlog based on custom field values (priority, client, feature area, etc.).

When it's time for sprint planning, another automation pulls tasks from various backlogs into our current sprint based on predefined criteria. What used to be a 2-hour sprint planning meeting is now a 30-minute review session.

Templates have standardized our development process across the entire team. Every feature now follows the same task breakdown structure: requirements gathering, technical design, implementation, testing, and deployment. New developers can look at any task and immediately understand what needs to be done and how we measure completion.

For our longer client contracts with monthly delivery cycles, templates ensure consistency. Each monthly release follows the same pattern: planning phase, development sprints, testing phase, deployment, and retrospective. The automation moves tasks through these phases automatically, so we spend less time on project management and more time coding.

Technical Implementation Benefits

This setup delivers several concrete advantages for development teams:

Reduced Context Switching: Automations handle the administrative overhead, so you can stay in your IDE longer and maintain focus on actual development work.

Consistent Code Quality: Standardized templates ensure every feature includes proper testing requirements, code review checklists, and documentation tasks. No more "oops, we forgot to write tests" situations.

Faster Onboarding: New team members can look at any existing task and see exactly how we structure our work. They don't need to guess what level of detail is expected or what steps they might be missing.

Better Sprint Predictability: When every task follows the same breakdown structure, sprint estimation becomes more accurate. You're comparing apples to apples instead of trying to estimate wildly different task formats.

Improved Documentation: Templates can include documentation requirements as mandatory subtasks, ensuring knowledge capture happens during development rather than as an afterthought.

Getting Started

If you're dealing with repetitive project setup overhead, inconsistent task structures, or spending too much time on administrative work during sprints, these features can help.

Start by identifying your most common task types and the manual steps you repeat every sprint. Those are your best candidates for automation and template creation.

The goal isn't to automate everything—it's to eliminate the friction that keeps you from doing your best work. When the boring stuff happens automatically, you can focus on solving interesting problems and writing great code.