[codemac]

It also highly depends on your office culture around email, and how it affects your personal workflow.

At one job, it was like writing letters to fellow warriors across continents. You'd try to be thoughtful, taking a day or more to write really concrete and informational pieces. At another job it was basically the office instant messenger, replies were expected within 10 minutes of almost all email. Having direct reports changes a lot of how you're communicated with as well.

Right now I've been using notmuch+org-mode (to do list management that can link to emails, files, websites, etc), and so now I file tasks called "Read X" if it doesn't need immediate response, or archive/mark as read if I don't need to read it. Things that take less than a few minutes I do right away.

Once you take things as merely inputs to your personal management system, you no longer have to worry about how an app pushes it's workflow on you, you have an external one. This is why text files/physical papers are amazing - it's the lack of an interface that lets you organize things in whatever fashion makes sense.