How to make the status of every content project obvious before work gets stuck

Give your team a shared language for what is planned, blocked, in review and done

Clipflow gives you three organization-level fields, and they do different jobs. Getting them straight early saves rebuilding your boards later.

Field	Answers	Example
Status	Where is it in the workflow?	Scripting, Filming, Editing, With client, Scheduled
Category	What kind of thing is it?	Long-form, Short-form, Podcast, Client work
Label	Anything else you filter on	Pillar, content type, campaign, client

A project has one status and one category. It can carry many labels.

All three live in Organization settings, so each organization can classify work its own way.

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Statuses

Statuses are your production pipeline. They become the columns on your board, and dragging a project between columns changes its status.

Setting them up

1. Open Organization settings → Statuses.
2. Add a status with a title and a colour.
3. Drag to reorder. The order is the order of your board.

Getting the list right

Name statuses for the state the work is in, not the action someone takes. “Editing” tells you where a project sits. “Send to editor” is a task, and tasks belong in the task list.

Six to eight statuses suits most teams. Fewer and the board tells you nothing. More and nobody keeps them accurate, which is worse than having none.

Include the waiting states. “With client” is where projects actually stall, and a board without it hides your real bottleneck.

A status in use cannot be deleted. Move the projects off it first.

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Categories

Categories describe the kind of content. They tend to be stable: long-form, short-form, podcast, client work.

1. Open Organization settings → Project categories.
2. Add a category and drag to order it.

Categories are useful in reporting, because “how much short-form did we ship last month?” is a category question and not a status one.

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Custom labels

Labels are the flexible layer. They apply to projects and posts, and they are grouped: you create a group, then the options inside it.

For example:

• Content type → feed, trial
• Pillar → education, behind the scenes, customer story
• Campaign → spring launch, webinar

Setting them up

1. Open Organization settings → Labels.
2. Create a group and name it for the question it answers.
3. Add the options, each with a colour.
4. Drag to order both groups and options.

Where labels earn their keep

• Filtering boards. Saved views filter on labels. See Custom Views.
• Automation conditions. A condition on content type equals trial is what stops one approval drafting posts for every platform. See Automation Recipes.
• Analytics. Filter performance by pillar and you find out which kind of content actually earns views, not just which post did. See Analytics.

That third one is the argument for labelling consistently. Without labels, analytics can only tell you which posts did well. With them, it tells you what to make next.

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Tips and best practices

• Start small. Add a label group when you have a question you cannot currently answer, not in advance.
• One group, one question. A group mixing pillar and campaign cannot filter cleanly for either.
• Use colour deliberately. Board tiles can take their colour from a label group, so pick colours that read at a glance.
• Do not rebuild status as a label. Status is already a field. A “Status” label group means two answers that will disagree.
• Label before you need the report. Labelling retrospectively across six months of projects is nobody’s afternoon.
• Agree on definitions. If two people disagree on what education means, the filter is decoration.

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Frequently asked questions

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Related articles

• Managing Your Organization: where these settings live
• Custom Views: save filtered boards
• Analytics: filter performance by label