We just shipped a feature that allows you to duplicate a Clickety group and I know that a lot of people will be like “well of course,” but I am very into the possibilities this unleashes, so I’m gonna tell you about them! First off, it’s not just the boards and stacks that you can copy, but you’ve got an option to copy the members of a group as well, so your carefully curated collection of coworkers can also join your copied group.
Setting up a group is pretty easy. Adding members to it can take a bit. But setting up a board can be, well, a little more fiddly. Not because Clickety makes it hard, but because it’s more detail-oriented and we have to think deeply about the processes we want to follow and how to represent that on a board. Of course, after we start using it, we’ll inevitably realize we need another stack for an edge case. After you’ve gone through that much effort to perfect your workflow, you’ll see so many other areas that could benefit from a similar flow - but who wants to start from scratch? Group duplication means you don’t have to.
I’m constantly doing an “effort to output” comparison to figure out if something is worth doing. Setting up each stack can be just enough friction to mean I’m only going to create boards that are worth that time investment. Now that we can duplicate boards, that cost is much, much lower, opening up many more opportunities for me to automatically track what’s going on.
Short, repeated projects
Short campaigns that repeat regularly are especially well suited for a copied group. For content campaigns, meetups, or scheduling guest artists, it’s important to keep good working relationships, keeping folks engaged, and not over-saturating one or two voices - copying your boards allows you to keep on top of who can present and how long it’s been. If you have a quarterly check in process (especially if there are a lot of steps like “share template, employee completes self review, meeting scheduled, …") having your direct reports as members and all the steps reflected in your board makes this way less onerous. If you make regular trips back home and want to be sure you’re meeting with folks, copy your home location group and use a new board for planning each trip.
Keeping things tidy
My roommates know that I have a hobby of over-optimizing organization when left alone for too long. A color-coded tea collection held together with cardboard is a sure sign that I’ve been in the kitchen. So I didn’t really need an excuse to organize my Clickety groups, but now that I have one, I’m gonna tell you about it.
I like to make sure that I can see all of my top level groups, which means I tend to nest them. A lot. I’ve had an “archive” group for a while. It’s a place for short-lived projects to go to keep my active groups small enough that I don’t feel overwhelmed. But now I get to add a templates group!
Breaking big projects into manageable chunks
I’ve got one group where I track lots of people through a funnel board and to be honest, it feels overwhelming. Clickety is supposed to be about working on human relationships - I can’t bring my most human self if I’m looking at a pile of person cards and thinking about numbers instead of humans. That’s why I’m stoked to copy that board and start breaking the work up into monthly motions instead of an ever-growing pile of way too much data.
Another helpful side effect is capturing time-based context. As I mentioned in a previous blog, having context to “hook” a memory helps you remember more (I don’t know about you, but I am needing this so much more lately). Clickety helps you capture context, and by breaking long-standing motions into smaller contexts, you have more meaningful things to associate a memory with. For example, if I’m trying to remember someone I met once, but their name is escaping me, scanning a massive list is less likely to help me remember their name than going “I remember talking about the Suez Canal obstruction, so it must’ve been in March or April,” and then searching a much shorter list of names.
More on the way
We’re working on making Clickety better for humans every day. If you want help keeping track of the people in your world, sign up to join the waitlist below (and help us make Clickety even more awesome by providing feedback as we grow)!
