I used to be pretty into these kinds of things (typical case of "lifehacking to a point where it becomes a new job"), but eventually, only two things helped:<p>1) Discipline<p>2) Relentless Filtering<p>Any reasonably advanced mail app worth its salt has implemented #2. Every time an email comes in that you open and find that it's wasting your time and isn't actionable or necessary in any way, create a filter that would have moved it into a "Noise" folder. (AND "mark as read", so it's not another task to mark them yourself!)<p>After doing this for a number of years, this now filters about 10 to 20 emails every day, so I guess it's saving me about half an hour of my time (and considerable frustration and/or self loathing).<p>(The filter rules in Thunderbird are somewhere around 200 email addresses, snippets of texts in the header or body of an email. I actually had to make a second filter since the filter edit UI in thunderbird started to be sluggish after a hundred or so.)<p>Should you ever wonder whether you're missing out on something, just check the Noise folder. Most of the time, the answer is a resounding: Nooooope.<p>Of course, the only thing that really helps is <i>discipline</i>. The one thing that no app in the world can actually replace.<p>The sooner you start working on your discipline instead of putting that off by band-aiding yet another slightly unwelcome minor character trait with an app, the better.