I’m in the midst of a media cleanse. This started before the election when I canceled my Washington Post subscription. Jeff Bezos can do whatever he wants with the Washington Post, and he’s 100% correct that I don’t trust large media organizations.

After the election, I removed all news sources from Feedly except the Atlantic because I find their writing informative and compelling.

A friend calls this turtling. Pulling your head inside your shell and hiding. It’s quite comfortable here. With most of my free time, I’m leveling a dragon Holy Priest in World of Warcraft. #ama

I’ve slowly retreated from all social media with the exception of LinkedIn since around the time of the first Trump presidency.

Today, my only social presence is on LinkedIn, and even there, I’m not nearly as active as I used to be.

I think it’s mainly because when I would share an article like this one with my thoughts, I’d get next to no replies to it. There’s very little incentive for me to want to share things if I’m all but guaranteed no one will see it.

On here, though? I’ll at least get an occasional message from someone who liked an article I shared. In fact, it’s way more meaningful when I do, because it always leads to a deeper conversation.

Reading blog entries and books and long-form essays like those shared on The Atlantic are like eating salad compared to the fast food that people keep trying to cram down our throats in the form of incendiary attacks on people who are different from us.

As a self-declared Poet, I can confidently describe the Police because it is a job requirement that develops strong working relationships with these essential humans. I need them because the Police do the challenging work of keeping the trains on time. This isn’t simply holding conductors to a schedule but also maintaining the trains, taking care of the track, and ensuring we have a qualified staff of humans to do all this work. Oh, and how about a budget? How are we going to afford all of this? Someone needs to build a credible business plan for this train company so we can afford to keep the trains on time.

As a self-declared Poet, we also need to understand the aspirational goals of this train company. I also understand the importance of consistently sharing this vision with everyone. I know we need to listen because we need to understand how the company feels. I’m adept at organizing teams of humans with differing ideas and skills. It’s an endless puzzle that I enjoy attempting to solve. I love celebrating our victories. I feel our failures deeply, but I know that with the Police, we will learn from these failures.

I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking my personality is Police, but I think it’s because I’ve been ashamed to admit I’m actually a Poet.

My kids used to watch Daniel Tiger, and there was a song on there that went, “Everyone’s job is important, we all help in different ways.”

Our society needs Police equally as much as we need Poets.

A lot of the articles and videos I've come across lately are about being productive at work and how to really get work done.

I read an article by Michael "Rands" Lopp about setting aside one hour a day to just sit in silence and create something.

It meshed up very well with this video by Jason Fried, who hypothesizes that work operates in cycles, much like sleep.

In order to achieve "a good night's sleep," you have to go through several stages of sleep. If you're interrupted, you have to start back at the beginning.

So it is with work.

God knows I'm guilty of spending 12 minutes on a project, only to hop over to Facebook and see that, once again, nothing has changed.

I'm going to issue myself a personal challenge. I want to see if, for the next week, I can spend 30 minutes a day with my cell phone turned off, my email client closed, and my social media sites logged out.

For 30 minutes, I will do nothing but edit or program. I will ignore all others (sorry Shannon) and fully immerse myself in a given task.

I'm sure there's no such thing as a "paleo diet" for working, but I bet this is a good first step in that direction.