I've realised a few things dealing with time and attention, and devised a few strategies with varying degrees of success:

- Information consumes attention (as has been long observed).

- Corollary: excess information demands fast, cheap, regret-free rejection mechanisms. TFA describes several such approaches. The "DBTC" folder is one, but specifically refusing to use other, unmanageable, message queues (Twitter, FB, Slack, etc.) would be others. If a tool refuses to respect your boundaries, reject that tool.

- Time-blocking for low-urgency, but still significant tasks is useful. You're shifting from interrupt-driven mode to scheduled flow. This also means you can assess how your schedule relates to the incoming message flow, and whether or not that flow still exceeds your (now far more readily quantifiable) time devoted to it.

- There's still the question of how to prioritise items you're responding to. I'd suggest a rough triage method of:

1. Identifying high-priority senders (immediate family, work (management, colleagues, business relations), friends/social, and pretty much all else.

2. Randomly selecting from lower-priority queues is a way of fairly distributing your attention. If you can't do everything, sample a handful of items.

3. Quick "no"s (and learning how to phrase these delicately, if necessary) are useful. In some cases you might point the correspondent in a more useful direction. There's the physics professor's tactic of dealing with crackpot questions by directing them to one another, which preserves both attention and sanity....

My first exposure to the correspondence-limits problem came in one of the SF author Arthur C. Clarke's essay collections published in the 1970s or 1980s, in which he wrote of having had to resort to the tactic of responding to most of his own voluminous postal mail correspondence (and that international postal mail, for the most part, as he lived in Sri Lanka whilst most of his correspondents were elsewhere) with a pre-printed post-card with a set of checkboxes which answered most common inquiries. He'd already considered two further options: "Mr. Clarke regrets", and silence.

The future was not evenly distributed.