Day in the Life 7: Boundaries of Research?

I've been flicking through Lois McMaster Bujold's Ethan of Athos, one of the books I'm planning to discuss in the current chapter, which has led me to ask: if this day is about what research students do, then does that question depend on the definition of research? If research, for English researchers at least, is reading/watching and thinking and writing, where do those activities start and end? Does reading a book you enjoy become research if it has a 'research output' attached to it? Do talking about signification and Big Brother at home count? More to the point for myResearchSpace, how can this generic hybrid of formal/informal, public/personal, academic/colloquial sit in the kinds of work that research students do? Is this a space to develop a different kind of writing voice from that demanded by the thesis? Should there be a difference? What might that difference be?