The line sounds like it is about showers. It is about an inventory. You get one slot, and something is already in it.

Graham is not claiming that good ideas arrive while you rinse. He is claiming the mind hands that slot to whatever has the most unfinished business attached, and unfinished business outbids your intentions every time.

So look at what won it this morning.

For most people it was not the work. It was the invoice forty days late, the message from a co-founder that ended badly and was never reopened, the price you quoted too low and have resented ever since. A dispute is the stickiest thing a mind can hold. It has a villain, a number, and no ending, which is the exact shape the back of the head likes to chew.

The cost never shows up on the calendar. You can put ten hours into the product this week — the meetings, the commits, the deck — and still not have thought about it once in the way that produces anything new.

That is the part that stings. The slot runs on the train between Bishan and Raffles Place, in the queue at the kopitiam, at 3am. Those hours are yours, free, and right now they belong to a man who owes you US$3,000.

The fix is unglamorous, and it is not focus. It is closure. Most of what squats in the slot could be evicted in twenty minutes by a call you are dodging, an email that names the number, one sentence that says this is what I need before I move on.

So today: write down what your head was on in the shower. If it was not the thing you care about, spend twenty minutes ending it — badly, if that is the only way it ends.

You do not choose what you think about. You choose what you finish.