PragDave: I'm on vacation, and I've deleted your message—really

Most of my friends who have admin assistants do have their admin assistants do this. The admin assistant prioritizes every incoming email.

They respond to the ones they can, forward on emails better suited for other people and flag important emails for their boss

In fact

There are many reasons why writing emails is easy but replying is hard. The first is probably that an email that requires a short processing time from the point of view of the reader (read, understand, and possibly reply) must be written very well. Not everybody is good at it, but everybody will send you an email for the most unimportant reason.

So in this moment my inbox contains 5700 unread emails. Not everything is a message directly addressed to me, a few are related to mailing lists, a few about notifications of different types. But there is definitely a percentage of real emails that would require a reply in that list.

So how I deal with this? Using the most brutal of the systems, as brutal is the email problem itself IMHO.

I consider my gmail account as a stream, like twitter. I use the gmail priority inbox to do a first filtering, taking the same account without priority inbox in the iPhone (so that when I read emails with the iPhone there is some chance that I read messages from the 'unimportant' pool).

I also set gmail to show as much emails as possible in a single page. So this is what happens: every email has a time to live this way, from the moment it appears in my inbox, to the moment it shifts away because too many new messages arrived in the meantime.

I reply to conversations in a most-urgent-processed-first fashion. All the emails shifting before they get a chance to be processed are lost from my point of view.

This allows me to set a max cap to the amount of work I've to do for emails. This will make people not happy about you from time to time, but are you ready to trade your work, what you think is important, just to reply to messages that many times are not important enough to be sent in the first instance?

I think you encapsulated YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, among a myriad of other websites with that last comment. That's why I just don't turn any of those on at work. People don't even mean to distract you, but inevitably, they just do. I also keep throw-away email addresses for receiving the (mostly unnecessary) email updates those websites send for notifications and the like. The borders between procrastination and working have blurred so much these days that, even when all studies demonstrate humans cannot and should not multi-task, it's become the norm for people to work with loud (not classical or meditative) music playing, several social networks and news media open in a bunch of tabs, and a miscellaneous distracting website in the background, all while they work urgently on an assignment.

http://www.danah.org/EmailSabbatical.html

At its most crass level, an email sabbatical is when you make all of your email bounce. But you can't simply turn off your email without pissing off countless people in your life. Thus, an email sabbatical is actually a series of steps to let you step away from your inbox guilt-free and return to an empty inbox upon your return.