Is Your To-Do List Too Long?

Joel Spolsky found a way to solve his to-do list. If that wasn’t reward enough, he sold his solution – Trello – to Atlassian this week for $425 million.

How do you solve a to-do list? Five years ago, Joel and his team at Fog Creek Software took a tip from the East to solve theirs with the Japanese concept of ‘Kanban’.

‘Kanban’ (which means ‘signboard’ in Japanese) was created by Taiichi Ohno in the 1940s for Toyota. Known as the father of ‘Just-in-time’ and ‘Lean Manufacturing’, Taiichi’s philo...