Could Gen Z Free the World From Email?

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 nonprofit 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 theaters (’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 replace 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.

“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,” Mr. Newport told The Times’s Ezra Klein in March. He has been singing this same song since at least 2016.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/10/business/gen-z-email.html