Does meditation increase productivity for software developers and related professions? Is there any evidence for Buddhist meditation practices increasing productivity for software developers? Just from my own experience it seems like it does but I'm just interested into other experiences or evidence, anecdotal of otherwise. If I can try to clarify this further


Is there any research on this?
Are software companies using meditation techniques at all to help
their employees? If so, what reasons do they give for this?
Does anyone have reasonable compelling evidence for this from their own experience?
If I can broaden this a little - what about related professions? - ones
that require sustained concentration and maybe a little creativity.
Do they use meditation techniques at all?


If I can just share my motivation for asking this. I'm considering giving a lightening talk at a local software user group on this topic and I just want a broader idea of what kind of evidence there is around this kind of thing. If it seems like there is something there then I will probably throw my hat it the ring and give the talk. If it just my own personal experience I probably won't. I don't want to give the talk it it is entirely unsupported.
I'm a software developer and practiced different kinds of meditation (first - sit for 5-10 minutes with open eyes and pay attention to inhaling and exhaling, second - 16th Karmapa meditation in the Diamond way Buddhism).

From my subjective experience I can say that (other things being equal), on average, I am more productive on days, where I do meditation in the morning than on days when I don't.

By "more productive" I mean 


that I solve problems faster (the day of a software developer consists of making solving big and small problems/decisions) and
am less distracted by e-mail, Facebook etc.


Also, I have the impression that meditation in the morning allows me to better concentrate in a loud environment (i. e. I can easier focus on my work, when I'm surrounded by lot of talking people, whom I don't like). Same applies to situations, where I am exposed to stress.

Once in a while meditation (once in 3-4 weeks) leads to a productivity breakdown. This happens, when I discover some information about me (which you didn't realize/notice earlier). Usually, this information is a) embarassing (I've been doing ... wrong all my life!) and b) helpful in my development (you can only fix bugs, which you know exist - this applies to the mental hardware as well).

In my opinion, you can test the hypothesis "meditation increases my productivity" using at least two experiments:

Experiment 1: Productive time per week


Start tracking the time, when you are doing something useful (there are lots of fine tools out there, including those, which run on mobile devices).
Collect data on the average productive time for several weeks.
Start meditating and continue to track time.


Once you have enough data, you can use statistical methods to find out, if there is a difference in productivity and if that difference is significant.

Experiment 2: Accomplished tasks per week


Create a spreadsheet with 3 columns: Date, Task completed, Subjective size &amp; complexity of the task (e. g. "small", "medium", "big").
Whenever you accomplish something useful during a week, add a record to that spreadsheet.
Gather data on your weekly productivity (in terms of number of small, medium and large tasks accomplished during a week) without meditation.
Do the same thing, when you regularly meditate.