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Going Paperless

Reading this story about going paper-less in India is heart-warming. It is unlikely that I will ever convince my parents to adopt such technology but the fact that it exists and is being widely adopted is great. We used to have drawers full of files, folders and binders to hold documents of different sorts and  that is still the case in my parents' home. Every time a document was needed it threw my mother into full panic mode because she could not recall where it was and my father's organization  did not make sense to her.

 Watching this deep disconnect blow into a high-stress event was a part of my childhood. Like my mother I am not able to remain organized around my paperwork and struggle to find things in a hurry. Unlike her, I am the one who is doing the organization not someone else. Our shared struggles with organization may have less to do with inability or incapacity and more with refusal. There is also the concept of the brain's Area 47 

Area 47 contains prediction circuits that are scanning and monitoring the environment and trying to figure out what's going to happen next. Keeping Area 47 happy is tricky. If everything in the environment is utterly predictable, you become bored. If it's utterly unpredictable, you become frustrated.

Pleasure results from having Area 47 experience an optimal balance between predictability and surprise. And one of the principles of job satisfaction is we function best in that context — when we're working under some constraints, but able to exercise some creativity within those constraints. People like feeling as though they're not just cogs in the machine.

Maybe folks like us need one bit too much of that surprise element even it if comes at the cost of stress, We would rather not have a robotic way to find and retrieve stuff but spend an agonizing hour to look for it without any idea where the thing might be. 

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