Merlin Mann: The Inbox Zero Creator Who Walked Away From His Own Book

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Merlin Mann was born in November 1966 in Cincinnati, Ohio, attended the New College of Florida, and spent about five years in the mid to late 1990s playing in Bacon Ray, an indie rock band in Tallahassee. The episode argues that this creative, collaborative background shaped everything he later wrote about work. In September 2004 he launched the blog 43 Folders, about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work, and soon wrote for Macworld, a lifehack series for Make magazine and an Ask a Geek series for Popular Science. His best-known early invention was the Hipster PDA, a stack of index cards held together by a binder clip, inspired by David Allen's Getting Things Done and its idea that the brain is for having ideas, not holding them.

In 2006 a series of posts on email, first framed as an Inbox DMZ, became Inbox Zero, built around processing each message with a decision such as delete, delegate, respond, defer or do. Political journalist John Dickerson and comedian Rob Corddry both drew on his work. In August 2009 Mann announced a book called Inbox Zero, then abandoned it in 2011, and by 2020 he was telling the press the term had been misunderstood and that his own inbox was not empty. He had been podcasting since 2005, launched the comedy show You Look Nice Today with Adam Lisagor and Scott Simpson in 2007, billed as a journal of emotional hygiene, and later hosted Back to Work with Dan Benjamin, Roderick on the Line with John Roderick and Do By Friday. In 2008 he began treatment for attention deficit disorder.

• Hipster PDA cards were sorted by context, such as things to do at the computer, at the phone or at the store.
• Mann's point was to keep the share of your brain occupied by email at zero, not the literal message count.
• The episode argues corporate managers turned Inbox Zero into an efficiency metric for employees.
• He co-hosted MacBreak Weekly and launched Back to Work on the 5by5 network in 2011.
• Mann has credited his attention deficit treatment with helping him find focus, a subject he discussed often on Back to Work.