At work, I use the Inbox Zero strategy combined with Gmail's keyboard shortcuts. It's really powerful, a total game changer. The nicest thing for me is that I can easily keep track of not just stuff that I have to react to, but email threads where I am the one waiting for a reply. You can read about it in many places, there are tons of tutorials (both written and video) out there. As far as I know, it's the way most Google employees are using Gmail too.