So this volume is an email every 3-5 minutes, for 9 straight hours. Presumably this type of job is not an 8-5 deal so you'll be answering emails early in the mo

So this volume is an email every 3-5 minutes, for 9 straight hours. Presumably this type of job is not an 8-5 deal so you'll be answering emails early in the morning and late at night, but let's assume there are at least some periods during the work day where it will approach that volume. Let's also assume you've already removed all the newsletters, spam, etc. and these are 100-200 emails you have to at least look at every day, and that you can't just ignore or delete a chunk of them. The hardest part will be filtering the (as @sumthinprofound put it) the "do" from the "defer." If you're starting out you probably can't delegate much beyond the admin stuff. Utilize tagging and importance levels. If something is sent only to you, it's probably more important than something sent to 15 people. You can't jump every time an email comes in or you won't be able to do more than a few minutes of real work at a time. So, try to get away with only actively checking email every 30-60 minutes and taking a dedicated block of time to reply to everything that you can. Your particular org structure and culture will determine how exactly this plays out, but when I was running a brick & mortar business I would spend about 30-45 minutes on emails twice a day, at 8am and 7pm (give or take). I was only looking at 50-60 real emails a day though and that time usually included whatever work I needed to do to "complete" that email. You'll want to get to the point where you can be alerted to truly critical emails, but the other stuff just sort of sits there until you can get to it. It will take some time to figure that out, and only you know what the reaction at your work will be if you miss a critical email for half an hour, to know how strict you can be with your filtering (stricter is better obviously but you will end up with false negatives and stuff sitting in your inbox for an hour that really should have been addressed within five or ten minutes).