If you find yourself falling behind in getting all of your emails read, like I have in the past week, you may find it useful to put the following in your Gmail search:

is:unread in:inbox

This will filter your messages to just those that are unread and in your inbox. Pretty cool. This help a lot for me because I have a lot of filters on my mail that mark some mailing list emails as ‘read’ and put others under different labels without marking them as read.