With all those recent Docs-related made improvements, and Airtable-like features in the pipeline, we can see it's actually already happening, and with this post, I just want to emphasize that I wish to see that ClickUp stays ahead of the "next-generation" approach like Notion, Airtable, Coda, Anytype, Fibery, which is I think well described in the following article.
I believe we are already nearly there, but the last thing might be to simply give up the obligated "list", while the different list/board/box/gantt "views" should be replaced by one single view type, a "universal document", and the views transformed into "building blocks" so you would be able to add each of these views into that universal document.
  1. Domain Generalization. There are no specific entities like Tasks and Projects anymore. Specialization is gone. Everything is very fluid and you can define your own semantic. It means you can relatively easy use a tool to track Leads in simplistic CRM or User Stories in software development project.
  2. UI Generalization. There are various ways to see information: Tables, Lists, Timelines, Kanban Boards, etc. All vendors try to generalize UI this way. Old vendors try to keep up with this trend as well, see how Asana and JIRA added Timelines recently. Interestingly, the first implementation of UI Generalization appeared in Targetprocess in 2013.
  3. Automation. Users are becoming more savvy and want to automate boring actions. Even in latest iOS release there are automation rules. No wonder work management software should keep up. Coda gets Automation very seriously, Airtable less seriously and other vendors rely on Zapier (so far).
  4. Document-oriented approach. Most new vendors rely on documents or spreadsheet to handle work. Documents are becoming really rich with visual widgets, interactivity and subsections. Coda takes this approach to extreme claiming that “Document is an App”, Notion tries to do almost the same.