Most teams can start with three statuses: To Do, In Progress and Done. Any additional status earns its place only if a task genuinely changes hands there or is forced to wait. If a new status changes nothing about who does what with the task, it is just one more column to maintain.
What a task status is for
A status tells you in a word where the work stands. That does two things. First, everyone on the team reads a task’s state the same way. “Almost done” means something different to every person. A task sitting in “In Review” does not.
Second, nobody has to ask. When statuses are kept current, the team lead and colleagues can see from the list what is moving and what is stuck. Most of the constant “where are you with this?” questions, often called status chasing, happen because the status says nothing reliable.
The basic set has three statuses
To begin with, these three cover the whole life of a task.
- To Do. The task is recorded, but nobody has started it.
- In Progress. Someone is actively working on it.
- Done. The task is finished and needs nothing more.
That may sound thin, but for the daily work of a team of five to ten people it is often exactly enough. The advantage of three statuses is that nobody has to think about them. Whoever touches a task knows immediately where it belongs.
It is worth agreeing once on what “Done” means. Is a task done when it has been delivered, or when the owner has finished their part? Without that agreement, the Done column slowly fills up with half-finished work.
When to add a new status
A new status makes sense when a task reaches a state that none of the three basic statuses describes. In practice this happens in two situations.
A handoff
If work has to be accepted by someone before it can be closed, there is a stage between finished and closed. Peer review, manager approval and client feedback all fall here. An “In Review” status covers it. It is a useful signal, because at this point the next step belongs to the reviewer, not the person who did the work.
Waiting on something outside the team
If a task is stalled because it is waiting for an answer, material or decision from someone outside the team, “In Progress” is misleading. A “Waiting” status shows that the work is not moving for reasons outside the owner’s control.
A simple test tells you whether a new status is needed. When a task enters this status, does it change who owns the next step, or what the task is waiting for? If yes, the status carries information. If not, it is unnecessary.
Do you need a separate “Blocked” status?
Many teams add a “Blocked” status. It works, but it has a drawback. When a task is stalled because another task has to be finished first, being blocked is not the task’s own state. It comes from the relationship between two tasks. If someone has to switch it manually, it is easy to forget, and it can stay there long after the obstacle is gone.
That is why it works better when blocking comes from the dependency itself. In MyPro Sync, for example, a task can be marked as blocking another, and the blocked task automatically gets a “blocked” flag until the obstacle is resolved. The status system then describes the flow of work, and blocking shows up as a separate signal. We cover the difference in more detail in our article on what a blocked task is.
Signs of too many statuses
A status system rarely breaks because it has too few statuses. Far more often it grows too many over time. Typical signs:
- a task moves through several statuses in a single day just to satisfy the rule,
- some statuses never hold a single task,
- colleagues cannot explain the difference between two neighbouring statuses,
- tasks sit in the wrong column because nobody updates them.
If several of these are true, merge statuses. A shorter but accurately maintained status list tells you more than a detailed but outdated one.
Does every team need the same status list?
Not necessarily. A marketing team where every piece goes through approval needs different stages than a maintenance team where most tasks close in a single step. If an organisation forces the same list on every team, some team will always have stages it does not need and miss ones it does.
In MyPro Sync, statuses can be set separately for each project, and every status change is logged. That makes it possible to trace later who moved a task forward and when, and which stage the work spent the most time in.
Where to start
Start with the three basic statuses and use them for two or three weeks. Watch where tasks get stuck and where colleagues have to ask about the real state of the work. Where that happens regularly, a status is probably missing. Where a status never holds anything, you can safely delete it. A good status system is not designed at a desk. It grows out of the team’s daily work.