How many emails do you deal with every day? Researchers estimate the number for corporate employees is around 80, and lawyers may be on the higher end, given demands from both clients and co-workers. 

But email-heavy lives may not be the norm in a few years. Although the obituary for email has been prematurely written over and over, the behavioral analyst Ben Bajarin has studied work-from-home trends and found that younger millennials and Gen-Z may be primed to truly stick the nail in the coffin. 

• His research is about collaboration: The firm he works for, Creative Strategies, surveyed a thousand people who have been working from home, focusing on how they communicated with other co-workers. During the pandemic, online communication has been more important than ever, and a bevvy of tools are available, ranging from traditional email to video chats. 

• For people over 30, email was still king: Bajarin found that age groups north of 30 considered Microsoft Outlook their main collaboration tool. That wasn’t the case for younger workers.     

And the surprise winner for the under-30 crowd is….

Not Slack. Not Zoom. It’s the Google Doc. They considered the Google Doc to be the top tool they associate with collaboration. And if you don’t believe that people create Google Docs just to share messages, then you clearly don’t follow the teens. It has been a trend for the last couple years.

• After the Google Doc, Zoom came in second, followed by the iMessage. Email, specifically Gmail, was fourth (Outlook was even further down the list). So folks in their 20s are more likely to associate texting with work collaboration than email.  

The Verdict 

If you loathe email, then brighter days may await. But if you just loathe being bombarded with any type of message, then the change won’t be drastic. It’s likely just heading to a different platform. Maybe. Email could easily outlive us all.