alt Hacker NewsHave you tried Starred Inbox? That turned me from "person who often slips on requests" to "person who rarely ever slips on requests".
Basically, keep your inbox as zero unread. If something should be dealt with it immediately, deal with it immediately. If it needs to wait, Star it. Now, your inbox has a list of all Starred messages at the top. At the start and end of work day, work through Starred items to either tackle them, or keep them Starred for later. But whenever you open your inbox, the starred items are at the top.
With inbox you could have multiple bundles, instead of one "starred" section, and each bundle could have a policy so that after you finished triaging it would automatically be hidden for a day or a week, so that it wouldn't constantly distract you by appearing at the top every time you glance at your inbox. This feature was also never ported to Gmail.