Most trackers carry tasks that nobody has touched in months: a ticket opened two years ago and never picked up, an epic left "In progress" after the work moved on. They do not describe how your team works today, but they still land in the numbers.
- A status looks like a bottleneck because a few forgotten tasks have sat in it for years.
- Cycle time and lead time go up when someone finally closes those tasks, so a cleanup makes last month look worse.
What changed
A new Stale tasks filter sits next to Date range, Teams and Assignee at the top of every page. It leaves out any item that spent longer than the limit in a single status. All its visits to that status are added together, and time spent in a completed status never counts.
- It applies to every metric. That covers the Dashboard, Velocity, Time Tracking (including the Workflow Bottleneck Detector), Quality, Cost, Milestones and forecasts, Planning, Project Cost, DORA, exports, AI reports and the MCP connector.
- Choose the limit with a slider, from 1 day to 24 months.
- Set a different limit per task type. This works for tasks, bugs, epics, milestones and your own ClickUp task types. You can also choose Never hide for a type: milestones and epics often stay open for a long time on purpose.
- Each item is judged on its own. Hiding an epic does not hide the tasks under it.
- Only statuses in your Completed stage are ignored. If your workflow ends in statuses such as Pass, Fail or Skip that are not in the Completed stage, items resting there will be counted as stuck. Add those statuses to Completed in Status Config.
See exactly what was left out
The filter shows how many items it is hiding. Review hidden items opens the full list. For each item it shows the status it is stuck in, for how long, its type, its parent and who it is assigned to, with a link to the item in ClickUp. The time counts for good: an item that spent two years in Open stays left out even after someone picks it up or closes it. Otherwise closing an old ticket would pour those two years into your cycle time and lead time. To count such items again, raise the limit, or set their type to Never hide.
Where the setting is kept
The filter is saved with your View, so a team's View can use its own limits, and everyone using that View sees the same numbers. Without a View, the filter is remembered in your browser.
The filter is on by default, at 12 months. To include everything again, switch it off in the filter. How this moves your numbers is described in Stale tasks are now left out of metrics.