Alright, let's fit in one last deep work question here. This one comes from Brandon. Brandon says can intense collaborative work be considered deep? Yes. Deep work has two elements. Cognitively demanding, so you're actually pushing your mental ability. So it's requiring real thought and it's done in a state without distraction.

So you're not context shifting from the context of the work to other things. This could be with people. This could be on your own. I talk about this in my book, Deep Work, but it's often overlooked by people who will say, I don't do deep work because I'm in a collaborative field.

But nothing about that definition has anything to do with being alone. I think we we get caught up on that idea because we have a notion of deep work as Neil Stevenson, you know, in his basement alone in his house writing the Quicksilver trilogy with a quill. And yes, that is deep work.

But also deep work is a collection of physicists at Bell Labs at a whiteboard that they're sharing trying to figure out how to make the transistor work. That's awful deep work. Deep work is also the mission control in Houston during Apollo 13 trying to figure out how to make the air filters from the command module work in the lunar module.

You're focusing really intensely on something cognitively demanding, you're not switching context. I even go so far as talking about in deep work, what I call the whiteboard effect, which says if you're working on something deep with someone else, you often can obtain higher levels of intensity than if you were just working on your own, because having another person they're staring at the same problem on a shared board raises the social cost of your attention wandering.

Because then you're gonna have to say, hold on, hold on, back up, what were you just talking about there, you're pushing each other to go deeper. So actually, some of the deepest work comes in group settings. Brandon also asked about what if you're in like doing a therapy session, so this is he's a psychotherapist or teaching.

That's all deep to kindly demanding, you're not switching context, the number of people in a room doesn't really matter.