'It's great for defragging your brain'
Resident Tim Duggan refines his creative focus in nature
Tim Duggan is a longtime friend of Unyoked and one of our most recent Residents. A prolific writer and entrepreneur, Tim co-founded Junkee Media and is the author of Cult Status, which featured the companies of tomorrow (like us!) and got under the hood of what makes them tick. For his part, since leaving Junkee, Tim has lived a very Unyoked life, travelling across the country and now the world and proving that work-life balance is really what you make it. Jonno caught up with Tim after his third consecutive nature session to ask how being in the wilderness has helped his relationship, his work and the even the structure for his next book.
So you're first nature session, how'd it go? Did you feel like your brain started melting and you forgot what time it was? Yeah. I mean, I loved not having Internet in most of the locations. I still used my phone but I used it as a notes recording tool. So I’d still sit there in bed and my phone and my husband would say ‘What are you doing!?’ but I’d be writing ideas. It was a dumb phone instead of a smart phone.
Oh so you did work? On the second trip I took some edits of my book. But this third time I was in the early stages of thinking about my next book and it was Sunday morning; I woke up at 5am, all of the blinds were up and I woke up slowly as the sky got lighter and I sat there for about 3 or 4 hours and literally came up with the key concepts for my entire book. Just being there, looking out at that expanse of nothing. That to me was the breakthrough I needed for this.
I feel like you’re infinitely more zen than when I knew you in your previous life [running Junkee Media, which Tim co-founded]. But for people who didn’t, how high stakes and high stress was that? What decisions did you have to make to change it?
There’s this term I heard called Staff Zero, which is like a version of Inbox Zero. When we were at Junkee, we had 60-odd fulltime staff. That is really intense. You don’t realise until you leave that there’s about 30% chunk of your brain that is constantly churning when you manage that many people. Looking after them, you know ‘Is revenue doing well, that person didn’t look well today, I wonder if someone’s going to resign, is there a scandal, who’s getting canceled this week?’
As soon as that goes - and my way of defragging after I left Junkee was to jump in a campervan and spend 6 months travelling Australia - it melts away.
There’s a lot of parallels between being in the campervan and being unyoked. You’re in a space where you have everything you’d ever need and there’s real comfort in that. It’s confined but open at the same time.
You said the second time you were doing ‘productive’ stuff. How did you find working out there as opposed to being in a cafe or in the city? I mean, you work everywhere, right?
I do work everywhere but I need my silence. I normally put headphones in because I like to have no distractions. There’s something about the beauty of nature outside that made being creative a lot easier and made the work flow a lot better than sitting in a cafe while a machine is going off next to you. I felt super productive doing the work; there’s no Internet, my husband have said what we wanted to say to each other so we’re both sitting there.
Did you find you discovered new things about your relationship by going out with your partner? Did the two of you connect in different ways?
We’ve always found our relationship is best when in nature. When we want to talk about something important, we’ll go on long walks together. So it was a continuation of that. Even the long drives - having now gone to three of them the locations are just so well chosen, in terms of the journey to get there. So the driving is part of it, like the defragging of your brain. Then the hike. All of it I loved. We tried to do a walk at every location too. There’s this phrase from Rebecca Solnit, that we walk at the speed of thought. So you’re forced to slow down; even walking to and from the cabin is part of that experience.
Finally, for people not yet in the position of being at Staff Zero, what would you advise to start to achieve some of that balance? [Laughs] I think there’s a real opportunity at the moment to be able to reassess your priorities. Thinking of your actual life - the things you love doing. Thinking of love - your family, your partners. And then thinking of work. I think in the past we’ve always put work first. I’m exploring the idea at the moment of putting work third, after Life and Love. In doing that you end up being a better employee, a better manager, a better boss, more productive, a better partner…all the things you think you’re doing by prioritising work but you actually aren’t.
That’s the idea behind my third book, which it turns out I came up with at Unyoked!