ClickUp: when I stopped splitting my brain into pieces

There is something deeply absurd about the way we work.

We think in Miro. We document in Notion. We execute in Jira. And when the project goes off the rails, we point at the teams, the lack of rigor, the schedule that was too tight.

But the real culprit? It has been right in front of us from the start: the tooling itself.

The lost context syndrome

You know the scene. You brainstorm for two hours on a virtual whiteboard. Ideas flow, trade-offs are made, the energy is there. Then comes the fateful moment: “Okay, who turns this into tickets?”

And that’s when everything evaporates.

The hesitations disappear. The “whys” fade away. All that remains are lines in a backlog, orphaned from their original intent. Three months later, someone asks: “But why did we decide that again?” Awkward silence.

This is not a discipline problem. It’s an architecture problem.

What I was looking for (without really knowing it)

I didn’t want yet another project management tool. I had already seen too many.

What I wanted was a place where I could think out loud without immediately being asked for a ticket. A space where an idea could mature quietly before becoming an action. A place where the decision stays attached to what it produces.

In short: a tool that accepts that thinking, documenting, and executing are often the same thing at different moments.

That’s when ClickUp entered my life.

Yes, it does the basic job

Let’s get this out of the way right away: ClickUp checks all the boxes of a solid project management tool. Kanban, Gantt, dependencies, priorities, assignments… it’s all there. Nothing revolutionary, but nothing missing either.

The real topic is what comes after.

When documentation stops being a chore

In ClickUp, documents do not live in a silo next to the project. They are inside it. A framing note, a decision record, an ongoing reflection… all of that coexists with tasks, in the same place.

But what really convinced me are the whiteboards and mind mapping features, integrated natively.

An idea sketched on a diagram can become a task in two clicks. A task can point back to its original mind map. The document acts as a bridge between vision and execution.

The result is that you can navigate a project through different paths. Through vision (diagrams). Through structure (documents). Through action (tasks). And understand how everything fits together.

The anti-Atlassian

If you have survived the Jira + Confluence ecosystem, you know what I mean.

One tool for tickets. Another for documentation. Plugins to connect them. More plugins for whiteboards. Each brick with its own logic, its own interface, its own quirks.

On paper, it’s modular. In real life, it’s exhausting.

ClickUp takes the opposite bet: everything is native, everything is connected from the start. It’s not necessarily simpler on day one. But it is infinitely more readable over time.

The detail that changes everything

One point that is often underestimated: ClickUp exists as a native application. Windows, macOS, iOS, Android.

It sounds trivial. It isn’t.

A native app means keyboard shortcuts that really work. Smooth navigation. Less friction. For someone who spends their day moving between a code editor and a project management tool, that smoothness changes the working rhythm. You stay in the flow instead of breaking it every five minutes.

An interface that tolerates disorder

After years on Jira, I had developed a form of visual fatigue. Dense, rigid interfaces that punish you as soon as you step outside the intended frame.

ClickUp is not minimalist, far from it. But its ergonomics are more flexible. It tolerates temporary disorder, frequent reorganisations, trial and error.

On long-running projects, that tolerance makes a real difference.

What happens after six months

The benefits are not obvious in the first week. They seep in.

Six months later, when someone asks why a certain decision was made, the answer exists. When a project needs to be handed over, there is no need to reconstruct the whole story from memory. When a question comes up for the third time, you can point to the answer instead of rewriting it.

Documentation is no longer that painful deliverable produced under constraint at the end. It becomes a natural by-product of daily work.

Let’s be honest

ClickUp remains a dense tool. Without a minimum of discipline, it can quickly turn into a mess. And it will never replace human thinking or decision-making.

But it has a rare quality: it does not force you to artificially split what, in a real project, never is.

Final word

Refusing to separate thinking from execution is not a tooling question. It’s a matter of posture.

ClickUp plays that role for me today. Imperfectly, but honestly.

And the way the editor integrates AI deserves a dedicated article, coming in a few days.