Classify every sender signal-vs-noise; turn an inbox into a managed source.
A sender-centric system: classify every sender as signal or noise, auto-generate filters, and turn an overflowing inbox into a managed source.
Inbox advice treats the message as the unit — triage each one, again tomorrow, forever. But messages arrive in patterns, and the pattern has a name: the sender. Judge the sender once and you've judged every message it will ever send. That's the leverage everyone misses while sorting mail by hand.
So the question becomes a filter rule rather than a daily decision: is this someone I actually do business with, or marketing that found my address? Signal gets through and gets structured; noise gets a filter, or an unsubscribe.
Do that consistently and the inbox stops being a queue you lose to and becomes what it should have been — a source, feeding the system like any other.