How Do You Categorize Operating?

I am curious how people categorize their ham radio operating. Ham radio is such a diverse hobby. What we have available to use in terms of modes, frequencies, propagation, and the type of equipment is on such a varying scale.

For example - I categorize my operating in pretty much two categories. The first one is FM work and other "routine" operations. Most of what falls in to this category are my day-to-day conversations with the locals, or if I am away from home and catch some buddies on the air more than once. Any time I get in my truck the first thing I do is turn the radio on - usually to one specific repeater. If there are people on there already I will listen in for a few rounds to see what the topic of discussion is, unless it is a batch of my friends on there then I will jump in regardless. Pretty much any time I am going some where I have the radio on. I don't log these contacts because I don't consider them as contacts. It is like we are all sitting in the same room having a discussion - no need to log that.

My second category is everything else - all the non-routine contacts that I stick in the log. These can range from talking to someone new on 2m simplex to rare DX on 40m. Everything that is non-routine gets logged - even when I reply to someone calling CQ on 20m and we just chat for a few minutes.

Based on these two categories I tend to not think of my "routine" operating as "ham radio". It is just talking to people - which I can do in any other mode, be it the telephone, Internet, sitting around a table, etc. I think of my logged contacts and the operations in which I made them to be "ham radio". The specific circumstances in which I communicated with those people are the only circumstances in which communication is likely to ever occur - breaking a pile-up, bouncing off of meteor trails, bouncing off the atmosphere, having a tropospheric duct open up, etc. It is more of chance - right frequency at the right time with the right conditions.