I always knew I was smart, but this morning FoxNews.com is telling me that:
Einstein Managed His Inbox Just Like You

Wow. Who knew.

Seriously though, it turns out that correspondence is corespondence is correspondence. As a result, no matter how you are corresponding, or what medium you’re using to do it, you tend to look at issues that come in and prioritize them in a more or less uniform manner. That is, you will answer some messages immediately, others will be put off for later, some will be forgotten, and some will get tossed.

What I didn’t notice was any discussion of junk mail. Although it seems that Einstein found himself buried by a “mountain of correspondence” it seems just as likely that that correspondence was more legitimate than what we see in our email inboxes. The survey done indicates that Einstein responded to about 25% of the mail he received and Charles Darwin responded to 32%. That would indicate that at least those amounts of mail weren’t requests for them to donate money to a business venture, (and I’ll hazard a guess that they didn’t get any body-part-enlargement mail either).

On a good day, I might respond to 5% of the email I receive. So, while I might treat my legit mail the same as they did, there’s likely nothing similar about what we’ve received.