Hi @JohanW and apologies for the delay in responding to you!
Regarding the sidebar, I unfortunately don’t have any good workaround to help you with your specific situation. I’m aware this is a popular request and while I can’t promise anything at that stage, I will make sure to add it to my Voice of Customer report for our team to consider adding to our roadmap.
Have you considered creating a Portfolio and adding a “status” custom field? Every time one of your Project moves from one stage to the next, you could update this “status” custom field. This would allow you to sort your Portfolio by this custom field, and quickly identify which project is at what stage?