Bio
Merlin Mann is the founding editor of 43folders.com, a family of websites about personal productivity, “life hacks,” and simple ways to make your life a little better.
Merlin was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and raised on Florida’s humid Suncoast. In his senior year of high school, Merlin dropped his 1st period BASIC class so he could strum Major7 chords in the school’s stage band. Somewhere in this is a story that should tell you much of what you need to know about him.
In 1990 — despite turning in a wildly mediocre thesis on the ideological hegemony of television — Merlin was kindly awarded a B.A. from the prestigious New College of Florida.
Past lives have found Merlin toiling as a web developer, project manager, waiter, hardware store remodeler, court room exhibit designer, reluctant telemarketer, and enthusiastic but unprofitable indie rock musician.
Merlin’s writing has been carried in fine periodicals like WIRED, Make, Popular Science, and MacWorld, while 43 Folders has been featured favorably in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Time, and The Wall Street Journal, to name a few.
43 Folders is currently enjoyed by over 2,500,000 unique (and very good-looking) visitors each year, with an oddly popular RSS feed that apparently gets loaded over 100,000 times every day. There’s just no accounting for taste, is there?
Aside from writing for 43 Folders, Merlin is also the creator of The Merlin Show, 5ives, and 30 Seconds with Phone Guy. And, in addition to doing an occasional podcast for 43 Folders, Merlin is a host on the popular MacBreak video podcast as well as appearing as a regular guest on the MacBreak Weekly audio roundtable.
More recently, Merlin’s become a sought-after speaker and presenter, who’s received rave reviews for delivering his energetic productivity talks at Apple, Google, Yahoo!, Adobe, Xerox PARC, as well as many other esteemed companies and organizations.
Merlin currently does most of what he does in front of a Mac in the western third of San Francisco, California, where the climate is foggy, the pork xiu mai is plentiful, and his gorgeous wife and daughter are within arm’s reach.
