Turning off tabbed inbox was huge in helping me get down to zero emails. It got me back to one stream of data to watch and manage. Something comes in, I see it and process it. It also made the number of unread easier to reason about.

I do use filters now, but haven't always because I was always looking for a "move to label" option in the "Create Filter" dialog. Instead, Gmail calls that "Archive," which I assumed sent it to the Negative Zone of some special compressed archive. I'm an idiot, for years I just assumed Google didn't build a move feature into it's filters.

[That said, I do find Gmail (and other Google UIs) to be full of little points of frustration like this. Maybe others have had better luck with it, but Tabbed Inbox almost feels like it's designed to make me ineffective.]