Esther Dyson suggests one way to deal with the attention burden of e-mail: make people who want your attention pay for your time. 

The system still lets other people add things to my to-do list. But there is another way: The sender figures out what matters and puts money behind that choice.

The short version is that a sender must pay to send mail, while a recipient can set the price…. In the end, people are paying to get someone’s attention. You can go on sending free e-mail, but if you want to get the attention of certain busy people, you pay.

Forget about the details, which are endlessly tweakable– should there be a whitelist? how much do you charge? what sorts of third party services will emerge?– and the big idea is itself pretty compelling, in my view, if only because it’s a nice reversal of our usual ideas about the attention economy. Today, the attention economy roughly means “Companies or services capturing your attention and reselling some of it in the form of advertisements;” Dyson’s suggestion lets us put a price on our own attention, and use pricing as a filtering mechanism.