Week 5: Defragment Your Drive
I spent the last few days gutting this site to reflect a new focus on mentoring based on insightful feedback from the young women I’ve been interviewing. Hopefully you can feel the face lift which also reflects a drastic change to the internal architecture of the platform.
There was at least one late night which turned to morning where I just couldn’t stop tinkering with the changes. I started researching hacks for hours that I later realized could have been solved through a simple setting changed. Somebody else beat me to the punch and tried to make it easy. I made it hard.
Sitting on the other side of these updates, I got to thinking about fragmentation. Do you remember defragmenting your computer?
When I used to work at the computer help desk in college, recommending the defrag tool was up there with “Have you tried turning the power on and off?”
In a computer, fragmentation happens when a system does not have enough space to store a file as a complete unit. As a fallback, it breaks up or fragments the file into discrete parts and sticks it in gaps between existing files.
This is why opening certain files can take forever or, worse, crash your system. It’s true for computers and humans. Our minds can only take so much.
By running a defragmentation, you are telling the computer to re-organize the contents of its memory: compacting large files, putting small files together, and created a new order. Call it a fresh perspective.
I think there’s something to borrow from this mechanical process. How many times have you gone on a super luxe vacation to escape – only to be relaxed and come back to the same problems? The stress comes back in an avalanche. In addition to next month’s credit card bill.
Maybe what we really need is to defragment. For example:
- Set aside one day a week for the small stuff
- Organize the big stuff: Self (things I’m doing to take care of myself), Family & Friends (things that I do to stay connected), Work (career goals), and Spiritual (keeping attuned to a higher power)
- Create a filter to manage your activities based on the above
- Make a plan and defrag every month
Or turn the power off. Just for a few days.
