Merlin Mann of 43Folders (one of my faborite personal productivity sites) has a great series of articles (with more to come) about getting your email inbox to empty, and dealing with the overwhelming amount of email some technology professionals receive.
I get hundreds and hundreds of emails a day, but the real challenge is that the percentage of these messages that are actually actionable is growing every day. Managing the tornado of work created by all this email can be a real challenge, and 43F is providing some powerful insight in this series.
As Mann is fond of pointing out with his restaraunt analogy ("We're in the business of making sandwiches, not stacking orders!") they key is increasing the efficiency of the processing step, and to separate processing from actually DOING.
Every one of these posts is worth reading on its own, but you really need to read the whole series to get the total benefit. Good stuff.