I don’t know whether the same goes for other grad students / scholars involved into theory, but it looks like my level of productivity can be measured by the amount of bloc notes sheets I throw in the recycle bin at the end of the day.
Most probably, if you are really good, you don’t throw any sheets away at the end of the day and you even use fewer sheets.
Conclusion #1: if you’re good, you’re more nature friendly.
Conclusion #2 (more a Conjecture): I’m not that good. 
Comments 3
Potential alternative hypothesis: throwing away lots of sheets indicates high creativity. Perhaps not as directed or focused, but one of them may yield something someone only discarding 1/day wouldn’t find.
Posted 25 Mar 2009 at 4:16 pm ¶I like your hypothesis, Michael! Thanks!
Posted 25 Mar 2009 at 4:30 pm ¶Don’t know about grad students, but I find the more notes/sheets of legal pad I burn off designing a system the better the end product turns out.
Probably has something to do with Michael’s creativity hypothesis and leads to a possible corollary law:
Units of (usable) work produced today is proportional to number of sheets discarded previously, and inversely proportional to number of sheets discarded today?
(This of course ignores the effect of having fun with blogs and twitter when I’m supposed to be writing site operations manuals for my underlings…
Posted 25 Mar 2009 at 5:58 pm ¶Post a Comment