Despite the reasonable qualms of older generations, Generation Z
— generally defined as people born between 1997 and 2012 — is pioneering the
return of chaotic trends like low-rise jeans, pop-punk and Ed Hardy.
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But members of Gen Z do seem to agree with their elders on one
thing: Email. Ugh. And, if we’re lucky, maybe they can one day save everyone
from overflowing inboxes.
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 a 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 and
Zoom.
“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“It’s actually crazy how outdated it is,” he said of email,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.”
The shortcomings of email have only been exacerbated by the
pandemic. 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.
“After the email is sent, I have to think hard about where I was
and what I was doing. It’s the digital equivalent of walking into a room only
to forget why you went there,” wrote Vishakha Apte, 46, an architect in New
York.
Some have been trying to get rid of email for years. Writers
like Cal Newport, whose book “A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age
of Communication Overload” was published in March, has long argued that the
“tyranny of the inbox” causes us to lose our ability to concentrate. Switching
rapidly between email, Slack and other tasks creates a pileup in our brains.
“We also feel frustrated. We feel tired. We feel anxious.
Because the human brain can’t do it,” Newport told the Times’ Ezra Klein in
March. He has been singing this same song since at least 2016.
In 2017, a study found that the average inbox had 199 unread
emails. And here, almost 16 months into remote work for many white-collar
employees, inboxes have only become more bloated.
But younger workers, who were disproportionately hard-hit by the
instability of the pandemic, appear to be reassessing their professional
priorities. And maybe they will really be able to do what the work of Newport —
who at 39 is on the elder cusp of millennial — has not been able to do.
Harrison Stevens, 23, started a vintage clothing company while
at the University of Oregon and opened a location after graduating in 2020. He
started giving clients his personal number and has them text or call him, which
he says helps alleviate the load but introduces a new problem of not having
clear work-life balance.
Aurora Biggers, 22, a journalist who recently graduated from
George Fox University, said she used to give out her number but was getting so
many texts that it was infringing on personal time. She thinks her generation
is less inclined to use email as their main form of communication. While she
likes the work-home boundaries that email offers, she said what she finds most
difficult is that there isn’t one standard form of communication. The main
problem with email then is not necessarily that there is too much of it, but
too much competition.
“It’s impossible to expect email to be the main form of
communication because so many people aren’t working office jobs or are sitting
in an office with an email notification coming through,” she said. “I don’t
think it’s the most relevant way to expect people to communicate with you.”
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