Just to comment on your advice tags: generally, in the scrumboard/kanban (not backlog), you usually want one state per column, so should regularly not be sorting this way. But, of course, you can setup process states with the work item level states like you are describing. Something you may want to look at are the process settings at the organization-level. Usually, per work item type, there are three different groupings that a state can be in. These may help the default sort order.