I do choose to remove some of the pain points differently, though.
I write things in the newest languages at home, rather than at work. Anything I do at work should be re-usable by anyone on the team, and that's hard if it's in some fancy new language that nobody else has looked into yet.
Rather than sort through email manually, I set up filters. Then I scan the subjects of all the new emails in that tag, read the ones that are important, and then mark the rest read all at once. (I don't have to archive because I set my filtered email to never hit the in-box.) GMail has some nice shortcuts as he noted. I use this to mark all unread messages as read: UIN (Select all unread, mark read, unselect.)
I also streamline anything I'm asked to do repeatedly, like add new fields to a form. I know I'm going to be asked to do this constantly, so now it's just a matter of adding a little metadata and the rest happens automatically.
And I also put everything I can into the hands of others, so long as it doesn't involve changing code. If there's a list of Titles that change a lot, I give the ability to change them to whoever requests it. (Business rules are what stop them anyhow, not me.) Then I don't have to do that any more. (That's rather simplistic, but I can't give more elaborate examples for fear of breaking my NDA.)