How do I change a board's column from being considered "In Progress" to "To Do"

[Will Lacey]

My question is very similar to this post; however, the provided solution does not answer my question.

Below I'd like to consider the columns "BLOCKED" and "TO DO" as gray (seen below), but I can only seem to have one marked as this at a time. While I can reduce the number of columns on my board, but I'd like to keep five.

TLDR: I would like to change the number of columns Jira considers "To Do", not the issue statuses. 

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Will Lacey -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

For Jira board configurations:

• the left-most column is considered "to do"; that is, not started work 
• the right-most column is considered "done"
• everything in the middle is "in progress"
• when a backlog is used for a Kanban board, a status could be mapped to that as also not started work 
• for a backlog with a Scrum board, the active sprint is the thing which distinguishes the not started work in the backlog versus the board's left-most column
• status values not mapped to a column are indeterminate
• the status category has no impact on the board consideration of "to do", "in progress", and "done" (even though the category names are the same)

Thus, you cannot have both 5 separate columns and have your "Blocked" and "To Do" status values both considered as not started work for the board.

You could have 4 columns and put both in the left-most column, or eliminate the "Blocked" status and use another indicator for "blocked work", etc.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Grace Collins]

Hey Will! This is a classic Jira board quirk.

Even if you name a column To Do, Jira looks at its position on the board to decide the color. Since your Blocked column is the second one, Jira automatically gives it that blue In Progress category. If you really want both to be gray, your best bet is to combine them into one column and just use different statuses inside that single column. It might make the board look a bit tighter, but it is the only way to keep that gray color for both statuses at the same time.

[Gunjan Kumar]

Hi Will,
Your “TO DO” column is blue because the status inside it is marked as In Progress, not To Do. Jira doesn’t color columns by their name; it colors them by the status category (To Do = grey, In Progress = blue, Done = green) behind them. If you want TO DO to be grey, change the status mapped to that column so it belongs to the To Do category.

[Will Lacey]

Hey Gunjan,

This is exactly what I'd like to accomplish. Is this a plug-in? When I create a new column, it merely appends it to the other columns.

[Gunjan Kumar]

I think it’s a plug-in because, by default, we can create multiple columns and map multiple statuses to each column (reference: https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/configure-columns/
This is something we can do in Jira without any plug-in.