The 3-step method Mark Cuban uses to sort over 1,000 emails a day

When it comes to famous people, Mark Cuban is a very easy person to reach. He has several public email addresses where he invites entrepreneurs to send him pitches and ask for advice. As you can imagine, many people accept it.

Cuban says they receive between 750 and 1,000 emails from entrepreneurs every day. And he's working on all of them, in addition to all the other emails he gets from his team and everyone else. Most people seem interested in how to craft an email that will grab his attention, but as an efficiency nerd and self-proclaimed email expert, I was more curious how he handled so many emails.

Here's what I found, along with some sage advice from me.

Step 1: Delete

In an episode of the Raising the Bar podcast, Cuban explained that his primary method of dealing with all those emails was to "delete, delete, delete." He said it takes him about two seconds to decide whether to reply to an email or delete it.

I think that's great advice, except for one glaring problem. There really is no need to delete an email these days. Instead, you should archive your emails. When an email is deleted, it's gone forever, but archiving means it's still accessible in your email archives.

Whenever an email doesn't concern you or deserves a response, you should archive it to remove it from your inbox without actually deleting it. This way you can keep your inbox clean without losing anything. This is a crucial step towards achieving Inbox Zero, an email management technique that I highly recommend implementing.

Step 2: Delegate

If Cuban sees something that piques his interest, he'll send a quick response peppering them with questions. If the person provides sufficient answers, they know there is potential.

At this point, he forwards the email to his team. Essentially, it delegates the conversation to someone else. He says, "I have different people with different types of expertise and I'll ask them to dig deeper and cover the bases that I'm not completely familiar with," which I often find myself doing.

As a company founder, I spent years building a team of experts. So if I end up in an email conversation that would be better suited to someone more specialized than me, I'll just CC the relevant person on my team and ask them to take over the conversation. I hope they make a better decision than me since it's their area of ​​expertise, and it's now one less thing to think about.

Step 3: filter

The first two steps are basically about how Cuban handles the 1,000 emails he receives every day from entrepreneurs. But there is one last strategy he implements to reduce the number of emails he receives in the first place.

For anyone looking to get Cuban's attention, he says "the worst thing you can do" is email him repeatedly. His solution to this is simple: he creates a filter in Gmail that automatically deletes all emails from the specified address.

This specific technique probably isn't relevant to most people, but it's worth thinking about how you might implement a similar technique in your daily life. I often say "the best way to get to Inbox Zero is to get to Email Zero", which means the best way to reduce the number of emails is to limit the number of emails that come in in your inbox.

Most email tools have automatic filtering features that sort...