One technique I used in Outlook back when I was customer-facing was to have color rules, so an email with only me in the To: line would be green, me in the CC/B

One technique I used in Outlook back when I was customer-facing was to have color rules, so an email with only me in the To: line would be green, me in the CC/BCC red. So you can glance at your unread/read inbox and get a signal as to what you might need to read first. I’m sure you could do this with folders or tags in gmail, I found it useful to be able to see everything unread at a glance. Never got to inbox zero consistently but archiving the “done” emails to stay as close as possible helps. More important I think is having some system for managing your todos, which you need to be able to create in one click from an email. I ended up with an outlook task list, I think it’s useful to be able to trigger an email to be “due in 2 days” if you need to say check in on a thread.