System Tools

I heard a wonderfully simple analogy yesterday during a group meditation on Psalm 23. We were looking at how the concept of rest is a divine source of re-charge for the soul; how the busy-ness of day to day life can de-energize and drain power from the long-term plan; how the onslaught of a thousand emails, text messages and voicemails all awaiting response can clutter the brain so that ones efficiency at dealing with said requests diminishes at a rate which can cause major stress, and eventual melt-down.

The analogy was of the process of defragmenting the hard-drive. Those of you who are used to using microsoft operating systems will know what I mean. For those who use proper operating systems, I'll explain...

If you use your computer a lot, its hard drive gets cluttered. Installing and removing programs can be the worst culpret. Residual 'stuff' which the un-install programs fail to remove remain in-situ. The consequence is that when the hard drive's read-head needs to find a piece of data, it has to trawls through a load of disorganised sludge to get to it. If it has to do this a few times in quick succession, it can cause the machine to slow down horrendously.

Windows includes a program call DiskDefragmenter. What this does is scans your hard drive and re-organise it so that all the folders in use are in one place, all the system (essential for running) files are in another, and the free space on the disk is all in one nice neat and tidy area. This dramatically increases efficiency of the drive to store and retrieve data.

What is great about the program is the Graphicl User Interface, i.e., that which you see on the screen during the process of defragmentation - you can actually see it happening; you can actually see how inefficient the drive has been, and watch all of your files being organised.

If you haven't defragmented your hard drive in a while, you may find that you are not able to complete tasks as quickly and efficiently as you once were, and the arrival of new tasks seems to place a disproportionate load on your system.

Defrag. Defrag often; build it into your schedule. By taking this 'green pastures' rest you are not eating valuable time, you are actually re-energizing your soul, so that the time you have got can be used wisely and efficiently.