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: 1

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: 1) Discipline 2) Relentless Filtering 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!) 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). (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.) 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. Of course, the only thing that really helps is discipline. The one thing that no app in the world can actually replace. 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.