"It's only for the drive"

You might accept most of this and still keep the drive. The drive is dead time anyway. Twenty minutes with nothing to do but steer, and if you use it to go over the day, that's the passenger dealt with by the time you're home, and the evening's clear.

I'd believe that if the rerun ended at the door. Look at your three lines again. If your head was at work at nine, then the drive didn't drain it. The drive rehearsed it. The rerun is the fret in a car, and what the fret does is keep the thing warm. Having the meeting again at the roundabout doesn't file it. It makes it the freshest thing in your head when you walk in, which is why the boiler question got an answer you can't remember.

There's a reason the rerun is so hard to stop, and it's the same reason the earlier book It's already over gave for replaying old mistakes generally. The rerun offers a version where you come out better, and each time you take the offer, it offers again. The lines get sharper. Your manager's face gets more unreasonable. None of it changes what was said at ten past three, and none of it's available to you tomorrow, because tomorrow's conversation won't follow the script. The rerun is a story you're telling yourself in which you're the one who was wronged and also the one who wins, and it's a satisfying story, and it does nothing.

There's an honest use of the drive, and it's the opposite of the rerun. It's the working-out, held to one question and given a stopping point. What is the first thing I'll do about this tomorrow. Not what should I have said. Not how will it look if it fails. What's first. If the answer arrives, it goes on the last line when you get in, and the drive has done something. If it doesn't arrive in a few minutes, it's not going to arrive at the roundabout, and the rest of the drive is better spent on the radio or the road.

Most of the time, though, the drive isn't the place to solve anything, and I'd rather you didn't try. What the drive is for, in this book, is the crossing. It's the twenty minutes in which work stops being where you are and home starts being where you're going, and chapter 19 is about how to use it that way. A drive spent on the rerun is a drive spent bringing the office with you, mile by mile, so that when you get out of the car the office gets out too.