It sounds like a remark about daydreaming. It is an inventory.

The slot is easy to check. Whatever arrived uninvited in the shower this morning, or in the last three stops before your station, or in the four minutes before sleep — that is what you are actually working on this month.

Your calendar says otherwise. The calendar is the account of your hours; the drift is the account of your attention, and only one of them compounds.

Nobody picks their top idea. It gets taken.

Graham named the two thieves: money, and disputes. The round that has not closed. The message from Tuesday you have now rewritten in your head eleven times, in a conversation the other person is not having.

Both feel urgent. Neither one is work.

And the slot holds one tenant. While the argument lives there, the problem you are paid to solve gets the leftovers — the scheduled hour, the meeting where you sit visibly present and think about something else.

You cannot evict it by deciding to. Willpower does not reach the place thoughts drift to; drift is the word for what happens once you stop steering.

You evict it by settling the thing.

Sign or walk. Send the message instead of drafting it a twelfth time. Ask for the number outright rather than modelling it for another week.

So today: name yesterday's drift target — the real one, not the flattering one — and do the single thing that would end it before lunch.

You are not clearing your head. You are choosing what gets to live in it.