Well, my job is a really peculiar one in that regard. For a lot of the e-mail I am just the recipient of information or files to be read, filed away and/or forwarded. Sometimes they're questions or requests, but rarely are they urgently time-critical.
For example, in the day in the office after my meetings and before the drive to CA, I launched about 8 e-mail ballots to voting members of my committee who were not at the meeting. That was "drop and run", because they have two weeks to respond. A number of the e-mails today were their votes, which I had to register on a tracking form and deposit the e-mails in the appropriate folder for the ballot (and send a thank-you as a courtesy).
A few e-mails were progress reports or studies, to be read and possibly filed away. One of the latter I forwarded to a colleague (my future boss?).
Several were some "responses to public review comments" which I collected then forwarded to the aforementioned voting members in another e-mail ballot.
Some others were responses to an offered "thank you from the president" e-mail; I collected their requests, entered them on a form (and sent a courtesy notice that I'd done that), and next week sent that form to the society HQ.
One was a request last Thursday for me to upload the meeting documents to a server site -- whoops, normally that would have been done right after the meeting. That one might have been a little timely, but my predecessor set the standard for the chairman being so busy responses are sometimes slow.
In my workaday world I'm generally dealing with a lot of stuff like above, plus a number of concurrent e-mail conversations that do not need quick attention. The latter is what the phone is for, and one received e-mail quickly spun into two e-mail conversations and then three telephone and in-person (in-plant) discussions on related but different topics, the last of which I hope to conclude tomorrow, but one threatens to spiral into yet another discussion with different corporate players.
It's fun generally, but it can be stressful -- particularly when trying to track a whole bunch of balls in play simultaneously when deadlines are approaching.
But I also suddenly see really clearly why I am not writing software today. To do that you need long stretches of time without any interruptions or diversions in order to focus on one task.
It’s clear that our minds work on very different levels.
Good thing I’m in sales.
;-)