Cleaning up your desk is beneficial (Corrolary - When you lose something, clean up)

Editor's note: This is a series entitled "Shriram Paranjpe's Ph.D. hypotheses series". The experiments documented through this series have reportedly been referred to as "lacking scientific merit". However, in a bold move, this blog has decided to print them. We believe ourselves to be visionaries who will be feted by future generations. Unfortunately, we will not get the pleasure of being acknowledged by our own. Your comments on this specific article or the whole series will be greatly appreciated.

Introduction:
Previous studies have indicated that junk accumulates (Paranjpe 2009 - have to self reference at least once right). This research was therefore carried out to identify the reasons for the differences between this great research paper and suggestions made otherwise in popular sitcoms (Geller 1994-2003) that junk does not accumulate (that is 2 degrees of separation between me and a character in FRIENDS). A thorough literature review indicated that the root cause of this difference is that junk is not allowed to accumulate in most places. The motivation behind this cleanup has not been studied (in other words, I want my theory to be correct and therefore, I am not referencing the others). Therefore, we dreamed up this study. The objective of this research was to understand the motivation behind cleaning up.

Materials and methods:
The piled up junk was cleaned up at the three places where it was reportedly allowed to pile up (Paranjpe 2009) and the benefits of the actions were studied.

Results and Discussion:
The cleanup at the office resulted in retrieval of a long lost 2 GB flash drive as well as a movie rewards card that will give me two free cokes and a popcorn with the purchase of just 2 more movie tickets. This is a great result which indicates the true motivation behind cleaning up. However, the clean up in the other two locations resulted in nothing of value being found. The results of the study are therefore not totally clear.

Conclusions:
A part of the study indicated that there is some motivation behind cleaning up. However, the result was not statistically significant and needs further research.

Future work:
It is possible that motivation might not be the actual driving force behind this tendency to clean up. Some researchers have suggested that the root cause of the clean up motion is psychological with childhood trauma (being forced by parents/being punished) and sociological limitations (How can you live here?) possibly playing a part in the clean up process. Since psychological analysis was not a part of our grant, this angle was not studied further.