Feature Request: Hierarchical Projects, Custom Ordering & Subprojects in ChatGPT

I would like to suggest an improvement to the current Projects feature in ChatGPT, particularly for users who use ChatGPT as a long-term professional workspace and gradually accumulate a large number of projects.

Current Problem

As the number of Projects grows, managing them becomes increasingly difficult.

At the moment, projects essentially appear as a single-level list. For users working simultaneously across multiple clients, research areas, business activities, academic work, or long-term personal projects, this structure can become difficult to navigate.

For example, a professional user may have:

  • Client matters;
  • Academic research;
  • Business development;
  • Internal firm projects;
  • Content creation;
  • Personal projects.

Each of these categories may contain many separate matters or workstreams.

Proposed Solution

I suggest adding two related features:

1. Custom Project Ordering

Users should be able to manually arrange Projects in their preferred order, ideally through drag-and-drop functionality.

This would allow users to prioritize active projects, group similar projects together, and organize the workspace according to their own workflow rather than relying exclusively on automatic ordering.

2. Subprojects / Nested Projects

Users should be able to create subprojects inside a main Project, similar to folders and subfolders.

For example:

Legal Work

  • Client A
    • Litigation
    • Contracts
    • Corporate
  • Client B
    • Regulatory
    • Real Estate

Academic Work

  • Research Project A
  • Teaching
  • Publications

Business Development

  • Website & SEO
  • Partnerships
  • Networking

This would make Projects significantly more scalable for users who rely on ChatGPT every day.

Context Inheritance

An especially useful addition would be the possibility for a subproject to inherit selected context from its parent Project.

For example, a parent Project could contain:

  • general instructions;
  • shared files;
  • terminology;
  • formatting preferences;
  • background information.

A subproject could inherit that shared context while maintaining its own:

  • chats;
  • files;
  • instructions;
  • task-specific information.

Ideally, users could decide what is inherited and what remains isolated.

This could create a structure such as:

Client A

  • Shared client background
  • General instructions
  • Common documents

Contract Matter

  • Contract-specific chats and files

Litigation Matter

  • Litigation-specific chats and evidence

Corporate Matter

  • Corporate documents and discussions

This would reduce duplication of context while preserving separation between individual workstreams.

Why This Would Be Valuable

Projects are especially useful when ChatGPT is treated as a persistent workspace rather than as a collection of individual conversations.

For users managing dozens of ongoing matters, hierarchical organization would provide:

  • faster navigation;
  • better separation of workstreams;
  • less duplication of files and instructions;
  • clearer project structure;
  • easier management of large numbers of Projects;
  • a more natural transition from a chat interface toward a structured AI workspace.

In my view, this could be particularly useful for lawyers, consultants, researchers, developers, agencies, business owners, and other professional users who maintain many parallel projects.

The current Projects feature already provides an excellent foundation for long-term work. Adding custom ordering, nested Projects, and optional context inheritance could make it substantially more powerful and scalable for professional use.

Thank you for considering this suggestion.

Thanks for sharing! We’ll pass along the request for nested Projects, drag ordering and optional inherited context. Current Project options are here: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10169521. We don’t have a timeline for those additions.