I support this request. The key distinction is that Recent is a time-based view, while Unassigned is an organization-status view. They should coexist rather than replace one another.
I would define Unassigned as all chats minus chats assigned to any Project, maintained automatically:
A new ordinary chat outside Projects appears in Unassigned.
Moving it into any Project removes it from Unassigned.
Removing it from a Project puts it back in Unassigned.
Recent remains based on activity, regardless of Project membership. A chat may therefore appear in both Recent and Unassigned, or in both Recent and a Project. An older chat should remain in Unassigned even after it drops out of Recent.
This matters when organizing a large history: without a complete view of chats outside Projects, it is hard to tell which conversations remain to be reviewed. But Unassigned should not imply that every chat needs a Project. One-off tasks, such as checking a service status, troubleshooting a single issue, or sending product feedback, may reasonably stay unassigned forever. Projects are for work worth organizing and continuing over time.
A persistent, system-maintained Unassigned section would make this workflow clear. Search or filters could help with large histories, but the essential feature is the complete set of chats outside Projects, independent of recency.
I understand the problem, but I think this is treating the symptom rather than the real problem.
If ChatGPT could search and understand all of my authorised conversation history by subject and context, I wouldn’t need an “Unassigned Chats” section in the first place.
I don’t always know when I start a conversation whether it will become a Project. I drift between subjects, discover something useful, follow another thought, and sometimes end up with a completely different discussion.
Six months later I remember what we discussed, but not the chat title, Project, or where I put it.
So yes, an Unassigned Chats section would help. But the bigger solution is:
“Find all the conversations we’ve had about X.”
Then show the relevant chats, branches, decisions and information, regardless of whether I remembered to put them in the right folder.
The information already exists. Please don’t make the user become the librarian.
This new UI is very annoying and useless. Previous layout was much better because all projects were sorted by date already, and all chats were sorted. There is no need for additional Recentsgroup. Now it is unconvenient to work with non-project chats.
This change has significantly disrupted my workflow as well.
Before the recent sidebar change, I used the main chat list as an effective “inbox” for conversations that had not yet been organized into a Project. Once I moved a conversation into a Project, I could tell it had been handled because it was no longer mixed in with my loose chats.
Now Recents combines chats that are already in Projects with chats that are not assigned to any Project, with no clear visual distinction between them. I have a large chat history and not every conversation belongs in a Project, so I now have no reliable way to see what is still unassigned versus what I have already organized.
It is especially frustrating that interacting with or moving an older conversation can make it recent again, so organizing my history actually creates more clutter in Recents.
An “Unassigned / Not in a Project” section or filter would restore the missing workflow. Alternatively, an option to exclude Project chats from Recents would solve it.
This is more than a visual preference for me. It has made organizing and retrieving conversations materially harder.
I completely agree. The recent change that mixes Project conversations with non-Project conversations in Recents has made ChatGPT almost unusable for anyone who relies on Projects to keep separate workstreams organised. The whole point of Projects is to create structure and separation. Once every Project thread is pushed back into the general Recents list, that separation largely disappears and the Recents list become unusable. At a minimum, OpenAI should restore the prior behaviour or add a setting that allows users to exclude Project conversations from Recents.
I strongly support this request. I use Projects extensively, and I use the Recents section to identify chats that have not yet been assigned to any project.
Currently, project chats and unassigned chats are mixed together, making it difficult to identify conversations that still need to be organized. A dedicated “Unassigned” or “Not in a Project” section would solve this cleanly.