Technology Shifts: Gen Z Tasked With Freeing Us From Email

According to a 2020 study from the consulting firm Creative Strategies, there’s a generational gap in primary work tools. The survey found that for those 30 and above, email was among the top tools they used for collaboration. For those under 30, Google Docs was the app workers associated most with collaboration, followed by Zoom and iMessage.

Adam Simmons, 24, prefers to communicate using “literally anything but email.” Simmons, who is based in Los Angeles, started his own video production company after graduating from the University of Oregon in 2019. He primarily communicates with his eight employees and his clients, which are mostly sports teams, over text, Instagram messages and Zoom calls. “Email is all your stressors in one area, which makes the burnout thing so much harder,” he said. “You look at your email and have work stuff, which is the priority, and then rent’s due from your landlord and then Netflix bills. And I think that’s a really negative way to live your life.” The turning point for Simmons was when a work email from the Seattle Mariners got lost in his spam folder.

“It’s actually crazy how outdated it is,” he said of email, becoming increasingly animated during the interview that we set up over text. He noted that messages show up in spam that aren’t spam and that he has to upload video clips elsewhere before emailing them. “It’s painful to use Google Drive.”“Part of the whole reason I don’t want to work for someone else is because I don’t want to constantly check my email and make sure my boss didn’t email me,” Simmons said. “That’s the most stressful thing.” In a recent survey by the consulting firm Deloitte, 46 percent of Gen Z respondents reported feeling stressed all or most of the time in 2020 and 35 percent said they had taken time off work because of stress and anxiety.

Members of Generation Z are often portrayed as constantly glued to a phone without questioning the cost. But Gloria Moskowitz-Sweet and Erica Pelavin, who co-founded a non-profit focused on youth and technology, explained in a 2019 article that digital natives are perhaps best equipped to think critically about digital habits. Members of Gen Z “are remarkably perceptive about the ways that technology has changed their world and have a much more nuanced view than adults give them credit for,” they wrote.

Inbox stress is, of course, not unique to people born after the email rom-com “You’ve Got Mail” hit theatres (’98) or who were entering kindergarten at the dawn of the Gmail era (2004). In April, in response to a reader callout on pandemic burnout, The New York Times received dozens of messages specifically about email, or what one reader described as “the eternal chore.”Another said: “It has, on the worst days, brought me to tears.” Others put it more bluntly: “Every time I get an email, it is like getting stabbed. Another thing for me to do,” a student wrote.

The shortcomings of email have only been exacerbated by the pandemic because it has replaced too much: Decisions that were once made by stopping by a co-worker’s desk have been relegated to inbox ping-pong. Some people wrote about feeling a sense of guilt for not being able to reply faster or for adding emails to their colleagues’ inboxes. Others described how responding to a barrage of emails caused them to lose track of other tasks, creating a cycle that’s at best unproductive and at worse infuriating.

Sophia June is a journalist with NYT©2021

The New York Times