All right. We got a question here from Taylor. Taylor says, how do you count time that is in between deep work and deep leisure? Well, before I even get your elaboration, my quick answer is, why are you counting time? Does it matter? Let's look at the elaboration, see if we get some more clarity here.

I have a practice of deeply reading and taking careful notes on books that have no immediate relevance to my scholarly research. He's a tenured professor. Because I file my notes into a Zettelkasten system-- oh, man, here we go. Zettelkasten corner, take two-- there is always a chance that my irrelevant notes may one day prove useful for my day job.

Should I count this note-taking time as deep work, or do you consider it deep leisure? Wondering for the purpose of budgeting my time and meeting deep work quotas. I mean, I don't know. Taylor, I'd say don't care so much about that. I don't think you have to precisely account for this time.

Is this exactly work, or is this exactly leisure? What does matter? That you are making regular progress on the things that really matter and obsessing over quality. We talked about this earlier in the show. You have a certain reasonable number of projects you're dealing with concurrently. You're giving those good attention, working on each thing till a natural stopping point before switching on to the next.

You feel like you're really exercising your intellectual muscles. You see the progress being made. You have the right amount of your time focused on the stuff that really matters. Do that, and don't worry so much about, like, should that 30 minutes of messing with my Zettelkasten slipbox, does that count in some ledger book as deep work or deep leisure?

Don't worry about that. When you work, when you work. When you're done, when you're done. Where it overlaps, it overlaps. (upbeat music)