Does meditation increase productivity for software developers and related professions?
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.