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Subfolders
in progress
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Casey Hartmann
It would be very convenient to have the ability to have subfolders. I use folders for classifying projects. For example, Projects would be a Folder name. 2019 Projects would be a Subfolder name.
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Sean Kilcullen
in progress
Hey everyone, I'm changing this to "In Progress" because we were able to successfully build 1 level of Subfolder in a local environment! This is a key step on the road to releasing Subfolders inside ClickUp. We are now doing the additional backend work required to get this in a scalable state over the next few months.
We are still on track for Subfolders in 2023 that is inline with the scope I laid out in my last update!
David Rastegar
If this ever becomes operational, we'll also need the ability to convert spaces into folders because of the way they have been organized due to this limited capability.
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Mario Rivas
Sean Kilcullen is there a planned timeline for the deployment of this feature?
Ethan Whitted
Mario Rivas: I believe he's said it's before end of year 2023.
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Carolina Ruiz
That will be awesome!
Caroline Ginty
Merged in a post:
Make sub-folders
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Margeir Palsson
My usage of ClickUp has been great so far but there is one thing that I find lacking and that is the fact that I can't create sub-folders in my folders. I am managing a company that has multiple departments and projects so having each project be a separate Space is great but I want to be able to have base folders for my departments and sub-folders in those folders for better organization of those departments, I don't want to have to have everything related to a department in a single folder because that will create way to much clutter for my employees and managers to work through.
Sub-folders are a perfect way to organize your folders in a clean way
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PIKI PAISAL
Caroline Ginty
Ryan VanGundy
I really wanted this feature but eventually determined that maintaining a very flat hierarchy on the left, reducing the use of lists as much as possible, and leveraging Views is a significantly better approach to organizing your space. I now think of the left sidebar as the "model", in the sense of "model-view-controller" architecture. We were way overloading the use of that "model" layer, and subfolders will only exacerbate this problem in many cases.
I do, however, think subfolders will come in handy in order to scale ClickUp to larger organizations, but I imagine this feature will be overused by smaller orgs. I'm glad we didn't have this available when we started out, as we were forced to simplify the architecture of our spaces. This is going to rub some folks the wrong way but I actually think subfolders should be an Enterprise feature to prevent smaller orgs from overloading this feature and missing out on a simpler, more scalable architecture.
Ryan VanGundy
I just saw the results of the poll below and this verifies that most folks who are looking for this feature are not interested in additional automations or permissions, nor are very large scale companies with many departments. They need a way to organize way too many lists. And I'm guessing most of those lists have very few or no automations or views, and are used just to organize tasks.
For those still struggling with organizing without subfolders, consider adding thoughtful custom fields (the "schema" of your tasks), combining almost all of your lists in to one list, and create several more Views with thoughtful filters. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. Let go of the need to manually organize things in to lists and folders. Give your tasks rich metadata and let the Views and Filters do the organizing for you.
Attached is an example of how far you can go with Views in a single list.
Additional tendencies when taking this approach:
- You don't use the "task in multiple lists" feature much or ever
- You don't need many statuses since you can reflect richer information about the state of a task via custom fields
- If you used Sprint folders, you eventually find you don't need those either

Neil
Ryan VanGundy: thanks for the alternate perspective. I’m trying to create an optimal template for sprints and to learn more about your system. Would you be able to expound upon it if you have some time?
Ryan VanGundy
Neil: I would love to share more about our system! It feels very complete, auto-organizes itself, and it is heavily aligned with the Kanban approach to sprints. It is, however, a lot of details. Until I can get around to writing a blog post or make a tutorial video, I would be happy to share more info directly with you. You may reach out to me on LinkedIn if you'd like a walkthrough, I could use the feedback before publicizing this further as well.
Amanda Arany
Ryan VanGundy: Just wanted to thank you for this perspective and the screenshot! I hope to implement this approach.
Mike Shick
Hurray! Thx.
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Chris Sheriff
This would be a great feature - fingers crossed it doesn't just turn up on the business plus plan like subtasks in multiple lists...
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