Defrag

When computers had old-style disks, one necessary maintenance task was to ‘defrag’ them.

That’s because, as files got created or edited, the computer would fit the new data — in multiple chunks — into any little spaces on the disk.

Over time, as the computer’s work got busier, these chunks became smaller and more spread out.

Then, the little reading arm was physically zooming back and forth across the surface of the disk more, to save or read all those little chunks in order to assemble a single file.

So the computer slowed down, because its work was so fragmented.

The only way to fix this was to defragment, or ‘defrag’, the data.

The defrag software would find all those tiny little chunks, and move them around the disk to put all the parts of each file in one place.

After it did this sorting out, your computer would be magically faster again.

I explain this now ancient bit of computer history because it’s the perfect analogy for a challenge that one member of my Transformational Quarter Programme has been solving.

After twenty years of growth and evolution, he and his leadership team found they were stretched thin.

They always seemed to be whizzing around between all their daily responsibilities, and never seemed to have time left to work on bigger or longer-term things.

Sound familiar?

He set one of his missions for last quarter to be about freeing up their time, to be able to focus on work to get the agency to the “next level”.

We worked through lots of improvements, and one was to defrag their work.

This included grouping similar types of work into themed blocks in their schedule.

So Mondays became “Management Monday” when they had their internal management meetings and tasks, and all the leadership team knew the founder had time available to be focused on supporting them.

This pulled lots of little meetings, tasks and ‘chats’ that had been scattered across the week into one place. Plus, the rest of the team then knew their leaders were more available in the rest of the week, so naturally began to keep requests away from Mondays.

In other agencies I’ve helped introduce “Future Fridays” too. Monday to Thursday the agency works on the now. On Fridays everyone works on things that contribute to the future. Team input to marketing and sales, professional development, knowledge-base updates, coaching colleagues, internal improvement missions, and so on.

By doing this defrag, grouping work by ‘themed days’ or other larger blocks, you save so much time and energy from context switching. You don’t really appreciate how tiring that switching between small chunks is until you stop doing it.

When you increase the size of the chunks of work and group them together, everything feels smoother and easier.

The ‘computer’ of your agency will suddenly be faster.

How could you defrag the schedule, and defrag your mind, in your agency?