For the external sources, there is of course not much you can do (except a filter for "unsubscribe" to catch most spam/newsletter emails), but for work email an

For the external sources, there is of course not much you can do (except a filter for "unsubscribe" to catch most spam/newsletter emails), but for work email and chat, having a strong established culture on what is expected can go a very long way. When I was managing a support arm for a university, I was happy to make myself available as often as necessary for my employees, but this had the predictable problem of getting phone calls at 11 pm or later about something as trivial as "the main printer in the Library is jammed". My predecessor had over-reacted out of fear of inconveniences like this and the result was that important problems, like entire dorm outages or critical systems going down weren't reported after business hours. I ended up establishing a simple and illustrative set of guidelines on appropriate communication methods and assessing the severity of an issue; maybe it's just because no one had taken the time to do it before, but as soon as the guidelines were distributed, almost instantly the level of communication fell in line with expectations - our evening student workers hit about the exact right level of communication for off-hour issues, and our business hour workers knew the exact right way to process new issues that arose. In my currently workplace, we have a brevity rule in place when it comes to communications be it in our chat or email. Spamming messages is discouraged and comes with some reprimand if it's a repeated offense, from the beginning, it is hammered into people's minds what other resources are available for reference before going to chat or email for assistance, and so on. Our frontline support works across the hall from R&D, and both teams will work in tandem when required for certain issues. iIt's pretty important to make sure we have the right balance of accessibility for resolution of new bugs and respect for everyone's time (higher tier support, R&D, etc). Compared to my very first job out of university, these two standards for communication were far better, and I think it left many people much happier. Having a grounded stance on communication expectations for your workplace can do a lot to ease the torrent of emails and messages; there will always be people who are exceptions, and will spam messages or email or phone calls for whatever whim they have, but you can't really plan for such types; the rest will fall in line if there is a clear expectation of best means to communicate. This doesn't have to be set in stone or put harshly, just clearly stated as "I'm happy to help - here is what I really can help with, for other things, you probably want to find X, and you can best get my attention by doing Y. Problems [P-S] get my attention quickly, other things may be responded to in T minutes." It doesn't have to be that formal, but if your time has to be that micromanaged, then something like this helps. Most people really are worried about interrupting and interfering, but there aren't always clear visions of what is and isn't bugging someone. Just getting it out there clear for people goes a long ways to reduce work stress.