n=61 days, 14,000 samples, r=0.04 against every variable I had.
I had a theory that open tab count was a leading indicator of something — stress, unfinished work, how scattered a day was going to be. It samples itself, it needs no discipline to collect, and it felt like it meant something.
A background script sampled tab count every five minutes for 61 days. Against it: daily self-rated focus (1–5, recorded at 21:00), commits pushed, hours in meetings, and sleep duration from the same unreliable device as the music study.
Nothing. The largest absolute correlation with anything was 0.04, against meeting hours, which is noise. Tab count does not even autocorrelate meaningfully day to day — yesterday's count tells you almost nothing about today's.
The one real pattern is a sawtooth with a period of about nine days, which corresponds exactly to how often I get annoyed enough to close everything.
Because a site that only publishes the studies that worked is describing a fictional process. This one cost 61 days of sampling and produced one sentence of finding, and the sentence is "no".
The sawtooth is somewhat interesting on its own and I am not going to investigate it, because that is how the last four months started.
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