I am an anxious, ADHD business owner with staff who depend on me, grant writing clients who depend on my business, and thousands of students in multiple courses that I develop, market, and teach. Despite always having a team project management system (Trello, then Asana, then ClickUp), I have always struggled, and I mean struggled, with project and time management. I typically rely on my *always on* brain to remind me what is due when and figure out what I should be prioritizing. Guess what, I’m terrible at prioritizing because whatever interests me the most at the time is always what I end up prioritizing. Until! Until I started using ClickUp with Reclaim.AI.
I had already been using ClickUp for years, but over the last year I had stopped using it to manage my own tasks, just those of my team. That’s because it organized my projects, but once they went into the lists and the dashboards, they just sat there on ClickUp and I relied on my memory to know what I had already worked on and what I needed to do next. I was beyond overwhelmed, I was actually often paralyzed to the point of being unable to do much of anything because I could not, for the life of me, figure out what was most important.
Then came Reclaim.AI. When I first integrated it with ClickUp and found it a bit overwhelming because I had to actually put deadlines, priority levels, and time estimates to every task I wanted it to preschedule for me. But once I let go of my concern of not getting everything perfect and just started experimenting, I actually got better with knowing what was high, medium, low, or urgent priority; how long tasks would take; and the dates I should start and complete a task by. That’s literally all you need to add in order for Reclaim to start filling out your schedule for you. You never have to figure out what to work on and how to get projects done again! (That being said, if you start noticing you are over- or under-estimating on time, you can adjust future estimates. What’s amazing is that now you will actually know how long tasks take because you’re tracking them.)
I know this is a lot to take in, but let’s look at how these two apps can manage and schedule the life of any busy grant writing consultant or grant writer.
How we Use ClickUp to Manage Literally Everything
ClickUp is a versatile project management and productivity tool designed to streamline workflows and enhance collaboration within teams and with clients. It provides a single platform to manage tasks, documents, goals, and communication, making it an ideal solution for grant writing consultants managing multiple clients and projects simultaneously.
ClickUp‘s platform is built around the concept of customizable workspaces, where you can tailor the environment to fit the unique needs of your grant writing consultancy. This flexibility allows you to create distinct spaces for each client, ensuring that all project details, deadlines, and documents are organized and easily accessible.
Key Features and Uses for Grant Writing Consultants
1. Task and Project Management: ClickUp allows you to break down each grant writing project into manageable tasks and subtasks. You can assign these tasks to team members, set deadlines, and track progress in real-time. This feature is particularly useful for managing the intricate steps involved in grant writing, from research and drafting to submission and follow-up.
2. Document Storage and Collaboration: With ClickUp, you can store all project-related documents in one place. This includes grant proposals, research materials, client communications, and more. The platform’s collaborative editing features also allow team members to work on documents simultaneously, ensuring that everyone is always working on the latest version.
3. Custom Views and Dashboards: ClickUp offers a range of customizable views, including List, Board, Calendar, and Gantt chart views. This means you can visualize your projects and tasks in the way that best suits your working style. For grant writing consultants, this could mean using a Calendar view to track submission deadlines or a Board view to monitor the stages of proposal development.
4. Time Tracking and Reporting: The app’s time tracking feature helps you monitor how much time is spent on each project or task. This is invaluable for managing workloads, estimating project timelines more accurately, and billing clients for your time. Additionally, ClickUp’s reporting tools allow you to generate detailed reports on project progress, team performance, and more, helping you make informed decisions about your business.
5. Automation and Integration: ClickUp supports automations that can save time on repetitive tasks, such as setting up task reminders, updating project statuses, and sending emails. The platform also integrates with a wide range of other tools (e.g., Google Drive, Slack, Zoom), making it easy to connect your grant writing work with other aspects of your business operations.
Ideas for Managing Multiple Clients and Internal Business Development Tasks
Client Workspaces: Create separate workspaces for each client to keep projects distinct and organized. You can customize each workspace with the client’s branding and preferred communication methods.
Internal Business Development: Utilize a dedicated workspace for your own business development tasks, such as marketing your services, tracking potential client leads, and managing your online content strategy. This separation helps maintain focus on both client work and business growth.
Collaboration with Clients: For projects that involve client input or review, you can invite clients to collaborate in ClickUp. This ensures that feedback, revisions, and approvals are managed efficiently, all within the same platform.
Templates for Common Tasks: Since many aspects of grant writing are repetitive, you can create templates for common tasks and documents within ClickUp. This saves time when starting new projects and ensures consistency across your work.
New AI Features in ClickUp
ClickUp recently released new AI features that allow you to:
- Ask questions from anywhere in ClickUp.
- Ask questions about specific Docs and tasks.
- Generate personal standups and team updates.
- Summarize tasks, comment threads, and Docs.
- Write with our role-specific assistant.
- Use over 100 role-based, pre-built prompts.
- Generate subtasks.
- Build Automations using natural language.
(Quoted from “Intro to ClickUp Brain”)
Why You Should Start Using ClickUp Today
In summary, ClickUp offers a powerful, all-in-one solution for grant writing consultants looking to streamline their project management, improve collaboration, and grow their business. By leveraging ClickUp’s customizable features and integrations, you can maintain a high level of organization and efficiency, even as you juggle multiple clients and complex projects. Whether you’re just getting started with consulting or have been doing it for a decade, ClickUp can meet you where you are and help you set yourself up for long-term success.
How We Use Reclaim.AI with ClickUp
Integrating Reclaim.AI with ClickUp significantly enhances the efficiency of grant writers by automating the scheduling of tasks directly into their calendars, ensuring a seamless transition from planning to execution. The integration between Reclaim.AI and ClickUp works by syncing tasks from ClickUp into Reclaim.AI, which then intelligently schedules these tasks into your calendar based on your available scheduling hours.
How the Integration Enhances Workflow for Grant Writing Consultants
1. Task Synchronization: Once the integration is set up, consultants can sync their ClickUp tasks with Reclaim.AI. This involves specifying which tasks to sync, either by selecting specific tasks or by setting criteria for automatic syncing based on task status, priority, or due dates.
2. Scheduling Hours: Grant writing consultants can define their preferred working hours in Reclaim.AI, indicating when they are available to work on tasks. This step is crucial because it allows Reclaim.AI to schedule tasks within these predefined hours, ensuring that work is planned during the most productive times of the day and respecting boundaries between work and personal time.
3. Dynamic Planning: Reclaim.AI dynamically allocates time in the calendar for each synced task from ClickUp, taking into consideration the task’s priority, deadline, and estimated duration. This dynamic scheduling adjusts as tasks are added, completed, or when priorities change, ensuring the schedule is always up to date with current workload and deadlines.
4. Follow the Plan: For grant writing consultants, this means the uncertainty of what task to tackle next is eliminated. Reclaim.AI tells you what to work on and when, based on the intelligent analysis of your tasks and availability. This “follow the plan” approach simplifies daily decision-making, allowing grant writers to focus on the task at hand without worrying about overall project management.
5. Flexibility and Adaptation: The integration is designed to adapt to real-time changes. If a task takes longer than expected or if a new priority emerges, Reclaim.AI will reshuffle your schedule to accommodate these changes, ensuring that critical tasks are still given priority and deadlines are met.
By leveraging the Reclaim.AI and ClickUp integration, grant writing consultants (and staff grant writers) can experience a significant reduction in scheduling friction, making it easier to manage multiple clients and projects while ensuring their own internal business development tasks are not neglected.
This system not only optimizes time management but also enhances overall productivity and work-life balance by ensuring that every work session is planned during the most effective times, leaving room for personal commitments and downtime.
Reclaim.AI claims to save users one entire workday per week, and I can say that I can absolutely see that. For me, it saves so much mental energy and prevents me from forgetting to consistently work on the 20 different projects I have going on at all times. I can’t recommend using these two together enough.
In fact, I recently taught an entire advanced training on how to use the two together for more effective project and time management in Grant Writing Boss Club.
Grant Writing Boss Club teaches grant writers to build and scale a sustainable grant writing business. It’s ideal for you if:
- You need additional income, want to replace your full-time job, or want to grow your existing freelance business;
- You want to create a business that actually builds financial stability for you, your family, your clients, and any employees or contractors you hire;
- You love serving the greater good, working with a wide variety of people and organizations, and learning;
- You want the option of working from home and meeting with clients virtually;
- You want to set your own schedule, whether that’s because you have kids or parents to care for, or just want to do you;
- You’re business-minded—you love working with clients, planning, marketing, designing business processes, and getting *ish* done; and
- You are a skilled writer (not necessarily with grant writing experience, but it helps).
If any of that sounds like you, I invite you to join Grant Writing Boss Club.
If you want to take your grant writing business to the next level (or maybe just get it started), Boss Club is for you!
