One way would be to escalate all automatically tracked/watched topics (i.e. by Watching a category) to Unread instead of New.
I follow a few categories on Meta and I wouldn’t mind those automatically ending up in my Unread queue. Then New essentially becomes my “let’s see if there’s anything interesting here”-queue while Unread becomes my de-facto reading-list. However, this might be an annoyance to others with a different workflow.