Have you ever felt overwhelmed? Have you ever felt like you were unable to get your head around what to do next with your life, or with the projects that matter to you? Then you need to run a disk defrag on your brain.

I’ll start by introducing what a disk defrag is and why you need one, but it’s very important to stress from the outset: this is a practical process and it is not to be approached in the same manner as the practice of meditation and mindfulness. I practice a Brain Defrag because you will be rewarded with more clarity, when you put in more effort. This is not a process of gentle relaxation for ten minutes in the mornings and can in fact be — much like a disk defrag — resource intensive. But it gets easier.

What is a disk defragmentation?

First, let’s quickly establish what is a disk defragmentation (defrag). At its core, disk defragmentation is a process that would be run on a computer’s hard disk drive or HDD in order to identify, validate and organise the data that is stored on the computer. You would know that a computer needed to run a disk defrag when, among other symptoms, it was becoming slow to open files, slow to open folders and slow to copy data.

The disk defrag would run for several minutes, often up to several hours, and would begin to sort and file the data into a far more manageable and easy-to-search repository. This is the equivalent in the home of pulling out all your clothing draws and reorganising them so that all your t-shirts were neatly organised and you knew where everything was so that you could grab the right item just before you headed out for the big day.

Full disclosure: I’m not a computer technician, so this is my summary of the process as it’s been explained to me over the years. Anyone from IT, please feel free to correct me!

Much like a computer hard drive, your brain gets filled with data. And much like that computer, your brain can become overwhelmed. Rather than being slow to open folders, it becomes hard for you to collect your thoughts; you get easily distracted and find it hard to figure out what needs to be done.

Why do you need to run a disk defragmentation?

Picture the scene: it’s late at night. You’re struggling to fall asleep.

It sucks.

You close your eyes and try to think of a happy place that makes you feel cosy and comfortable and — wait, that’s Derek from the office. Oh that’s right, Derek wanted you to provide an update on that project on Thursday. You still need to figure out what to send to him.

You feel a crack in your back.

Oh, you keep forgetting that you’re getting old and you haven’t done those daily stretches that you keep seeing on social media by those influencers. But what stretches do you do? How often you do them? What should you wear to do them? Where should you do them?

You’re wide awake now.

Every little thought like these are what David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, refers to as an ‘open loop’. An open loop is essentially a thought that goes around in circles, with no definitive journey onwards. It’s like a car, trapped in a roundabout – there’s lots of exists but you don’t know which one leads you to your destination. And for most people, there are dozens of roundabouts that your mind is perpetually trapped in. And when that mental car of yours begins to run out of gas, going around all of these open loops with no straight path home, you’ll start noticing more of these late nights. They’ll creep into your day and start disturbing your thinking.

But now it’s time to look at a process to help address these open loops.

How do you run a disk defrag on your brain?

Meditation is cleaning your cache; weekly reviews are your disk defragmentation

In order to perform a disk defrag, we must complete the following four steps every week:

1. Conduct a MindSweep to identify your open loops
2. Clarify your open loops
3. Identify a Next Action for each open loop
4. Perform a Weekly Review

It’s worth reminding you at this point that you will get out as much as you put in here. These four steps are crucial to conducting your disk defrag and, unlike a meditation session, it will require mental exertion and — when it comes to physical inboxes — perhaps even some physical exertion. The first defrag could take you several hours.

1. Conduct a MindSweep to identify open loops

We know that an open loop is an unresolved thought, chasing its own tail. The first step then is to simply identify all of your open loops. These are unique to you, and what matter most to you. To get started, first find yourself a notepad, a note-taking app or anything that allows you to take notes.

From there, you are going to systematically run through every key area of your life and jot down each and every open loop as it comes to you. Keep in mind, stage 2 is for really unpicking what you write in stage 1. So with this in mind, you need only write a line a phrase or perhaps even just a word. To help you at this stage, I have below a trigger list of topics for you to go through.

Access the Trigger List

For example, here are some open loops that I noticed when I began to think about health:

• Lose weight
• Decide on vitamins
• Read article on stretching
• Daily run
• File report
• Ryan’s birthday

As you’re reviewing your open loops, keep one important tenant of Getting Things Done in mind: complete any tasks if they can be completed within two minutes. Send a text to a loved one? Do it when the thought comes to your mind. Take your vitamins? Grab a drink and tick off the task in seconds.

These open loops can be simple tasks or larger projects, and you can express them simply as a word. The critical purpose of this process is to clear your head of all the open loops, no matter how small, so that we can collect and organise them as we move to the next stage.

2. Clarify your open loops

You’ve trawled through your thoughts. You’ve ticked off a handful of small tasks. Now is the time where we begin to understand what you’ve written, and how we’re going to progress these thoughts. To do this, you need to formalise a process of migrating these thoughts from concept to either an action, a project, a note to remember or perhaps something that you can consciously and deliberately discard.

Let’s take the example list we produced in the previous step.

Lose Weight This loop is a nebulous concept at the moment. How much weight? When do we want to lose this weight by? Why are we losing this weight? It clearly requires several sub-tasks and perhaps even a few projects along the way. So what I would do is, in your note-taking app or project management app of choice, log this with some more specificity as a goal. For me, I would like to lose 10kg in weight by the end of 2021.

I then determine what the projects are that will help me achieve this goal (these may not be immediately apparent). For example: Sign Up For Yoga Class, Create New Diet Plan, Meet with a Personal Trainer. Then I simply determine one single next step for each of these projects, which may be: ‘Call Yoga studio’, ‘Read article on calorie intake for diet plan’, ‘Call Josh’. Now, I have identified the goal from my open loop, I have clarified what I wish to achieve, and I have distilled this into three separate projects that each have one action to move me one step closer to my goal.

Decide on Vitamins I’m always chasing the new vitamins, but on this occasion I’ve determined that vitamins are not immediately relevant to me. In fact, it’s a Someday/Maybe item because I want to direct my attention to weight loss. So in this case, I add my Decide on Vitamins loop to a list- which can literally just be a row within a note, captured within an Evernote Notebook – called ‘Someday/ Maybe’. I’ll review this notebook once a week to determine if the items in this note are now more relevant, and something I could turn into a goal or project. So when my mind thinks again about decide on vitamins, I know that it’s in my Someday/Maybe list as something of lower importance that I can review later. It’s not keeping me up at night.

Read article on stretching It’s a short one. I can just read it now. Takes less than two minutes. Or if it takes longer, I can just schedule it for tonight with a link to the post for easy access. On to the next task…

Daily Run This is reminding me now of my weight-loss goal. Great, this means that my tasks are in alignment. But Daily Run is vague. Lets create a new project, since this could require tasks like buying running gear or determining routes, and we’ll call it: ‘Start Running Programme’. I’ll then determine my next action, which is to ‘Call Martin for advice about running’. This will inform me of the other actions I’ll need to do, but it’s going to take a few minutes so I won’t be doing this right now.

File Report This is a task that needs to be done by someone else that is more senior or is better qualified; this will free me up to do other tasks and ensure that it’s not sitting in my mind as an open loop when I can’t do anything about it. In this instance, I’ve decided that my colleague Bianca is better suited. So I shall delegate this. I can email Bianca now with a request for support, since this will take less than two minutes.

Ryan’s Birthday Oh! It’s nearly Ryan’s birthday and I’ll be visiting his house for the day. I’ll need to remember this, so I will set a reminder in my calendar to fire on the day, reminding me about my friend’s special day and that I will be visiting.

3. Identify a Next Action for each open loop

You’ll notice that we’ve already been doing this as a process of clarifying our loops. But in case you haven’t been doing this, the step here is simple: once you’ve determined exactly what your open loops mean, you need to identify one single action that will move your project or goal further. Whether this be making a call, filing a report, conducting research or buying an item, this needs only be one simple item.

4. Perform a Weekly Review

The final piece of the puzzle.

Once per week, you examine all of the projects that you’ve created; all of your collected notes; all of your open loops; all of your unresolved emails and texts. You then repeat stages two and three (you may also want to perform stage one when you are getting started with this) and ensure that every project has a next action, that every task has a clear direction and tangible action. This process eliminates the confusion that keeps us up at night.

Your brain disk defrag is pretty much complete. You’ve eliminated tasks that don’t need to be done; you’ve moved unimportant tasks to your someday/maybe list; you’ve taken that vague open loop and converted it into an actionable goal and project with clear next steps to move it forward.

Now you can free up your mind for what it’s made for: being creative, exploring ideas and transforming the world around you. Your thoughts are neatly compartmentalised. And like a disk defrag, this will get quicker over time as your mental files become steadily more organised.