I am thinking of conducting a scientific experiment. The general plan would be to track the varying states of messiness of my office and apartment, over the course of days, weeks, months and years, and correlate that result with my general state of productivity — or lack thereof.
This is a true scientific experiment because I genuinely don’t know what I will discover, although I have various hypotheses:
Hypothesis I: I am more productive when I am keeping things neat and tidy, because those are the times when I “have it all together”.
Hypothesis II: I am more productive when the place is total chaos because that is when my creative juices are flowing.
Hypothesis III: I am more productive when things are neat because those are the only times when I can actually find anything.
Hypothesis IV: I am more productive when everything is a mess because I throw myself into my work to compensate for feelings of mess-induced guilt.
I would like to think that Hypothesis I or II is the most accurate, but deep down I fear that Hypothesis III or IV might correlate better with the available data. ;-(
Please share your methods for quantifying messiness and productivity so that the rest of us may play along–er–attempt to reproduce the results.
It will all be described in my forthcoming academic treatise, The Quantified Shelf. 😉