As my email is on my phone, I almost never proactively check my mail - instead I check it in a reactive manner. All my email addresses forward to a central email which is synced to my phone. Once email arrives, I check its contents and either:

• archive it if I don't need to respond or need it for anything
• mark it as read if I want to read it later or it requires a response
• mark it as read and star it if it is really important (assuming I don't deal with it immediately)

Additionally, I have a pebble smartwatch which notifies me when mail arrives so I can keep my phone on silent, and I use the awear pebble app so I can star, mark read and archive emails without looking at my phone.

I also use a custom email domain with google business apps (basically gmail but with a custom email address). I have set it up so that I can put anything before the @ in the email address, and it will still reach my inbox. That way, everything I sign up to can have a personalised email address e.g facebook@mydomain.com or massdrop@mydomain.com. If I start getting spam from somewhere, I can often figure out where my email address leaked from, and forward everything to spam from that address.