September 18, 2024 • 40 mins
Discover the secrets to redefining your work-life balance and finding true meaning in your career. In this captivating episode, Tim Duggan, former CEO of Junkee Media and bestselling author, reveals his unconventional approach to work that allowed him to break free from the 9-5 grind and create a life of purpose and fulfilment.
Tim shares his journey from burnout to bliss, offering practical insights on:
🛠️ The power of job crafting and how to shape your role for maximum satisfaction
⚖️ Why work-life balance is a myth and what you should focus on instead
🎯 How to identify your core values and use them to guide your career decisions
🏖️ The life-changing benefits of taking career breaks and sabbaticals
⏰ Strategies for working a 3-day week without sacrificing productivity
🧭 The key to finding meaning both in and outside of work
Whether you're feeling stuck in your career or simply seeking a more intentional approach to life, this episode will inspire you to reimagine your relationship with work and create a lifestyle that truly aligns with your values.
Connect with Tim Duggan via his Instagram, LinkedIn and Website. Grab his book Work Backwards.
My new book The Health Habit is out now. You can order a copy here: https://www.amantha.com/the-health-habit/
Connect with me on the socials:
If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at howiwork.co
Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes.
Get in touch at amantha@inventium.com.au
Credits:
Host: Amantha Imber
Sound Engineer: Martin Imber
Episode Producer: Rowena Murray
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Do you ever feel like you're stuck in an endless
cycle of work with no time for what truly matters?
Meet Tim Duggan, a former CEO who's flipped the script
on traditional work life balance. After he sold his media company,
Tim didn't just retire to a beach. He reimagined his
(00:24):
entire approach to work and life. Tim now lives on
an island of Spain, and he has cracked the code
to working just three days a week while still achieving
his goals. But how did he get there, and more importantly,
how can you apply his strategies to your own life.
(00:45):
In this episode, Tim reveals his unconventional methods for finding
meaning both in and outside of work, and he shares
some very practical tips for crafting a career that aligns
with your core values. Welcome to How I Work, a
(01:05):
show about habits, rituals, and strategies for optimizing your day.
I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imber. In Tim's latest book,
Work Backwards, he jokes that his surname may as well
have been from Junkie Tim from Junkie, which was the
company Tim sold in twenty sixteen, Junkie Media. Tim wrote
(01:26):
about how his self identity was so wrapped up in
his work, so I wanted to know how on earth
did he go about disentangling it.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
It's quite an exotic surname from Junkie. I don't know
what nationality that is, but I was introduced on a
Monday morning in a meeting, this is Tim from Junkie,
And on a Friday night down at the pub, this
is Tim from Junkie. And on Sunday morning, when I'm
on the internet, this is Tim from Junkie. That it
was so much a part of my identity, this business
(01:56):
that I'd spent fifteen years building with my friends, that
I wasn't prepared for how hard the landing was going
to be once I was no longer Tim from Junkie.
It was way harder than I thought, and I didn't
have any pre awareness that I was going to wake
up one day and I left in the middle of COVID.
(02:17):
It was in the peak of COVID. It was in
mid twenty twenty, and my final meeting with all my
staff was a Zoom meeting on my final day, and
it was five o'clock on a Friday afternoon, and I
was talking into the tiny green light that was flashing
on my computer and then we said our goodbyes. This
was our virtual drinks, and I closed my laptop and
(02:38):
I was alone in my home office on a Friday afternoon.
I was like, Oh, this is it. That's the end
of that identity. It was a really, really strange way
to close off that part of my life. Originally my
plan was to do something to shake things up, so
just change my landscape. Changed my mind, and that was
to move overseas. After fifteen plus year have been married
(03:00):
to my business and not been able to move overseas,
and so my husband and I had been planning for
this for years. The decision to sell a business took
a few years. Then we sold the business in twenty sixteen.
I had what's known as an urnout, which means I
had to work for the company that bought us for
three years. I ended up doing that for an extra year,
and then COVID happened, so we jumped into a campavan
(03:22):
and we drove as far as we could, which was
the new South Wales state border because that was all
that was open at the time, and we had six
weeks in a camp of van and then that turned
into six months, so we just started driving and we
didn't stop. And it was during that moment where I
had a change of scenery, I had a change of routine.
(03:42):
I had a change of mindset, a change of responsibility.
That was when I kind of started to rebuild and
think about who I was if I wasn't from junkie.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Were there conscious steps that you took, like say, during
that six months to really reform your identity.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
I didn't realize how discombobulating it was going to be,
so I consciously changed my routine. I consciously changed what
I was seeing in terms of the landscape in front
of me. I actually wish that I had gone into
it with some kind of plan, because I'm very organized
and I like plans, and I like experiments, and I
(04:23):
like writing things down. I was caught off guard with
how much of my identity was caught up with my work.
I needed to have something that made me feel like
I was still contributing mentally. So I began writing my
second book, which was called Killer Thinking all about creativity
in the workplace. And I wrote most of that from
the back of the campavan. And that's because I needed
(04:43):
something to do. I couldn't just completely switch off I'm
not someone who can go and flop and drop on
a beach and just spend six months staring into the
sun and just daydreaming. I needed to have a project,
and so for me, it was writing a book.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
I want to know about the decision to leave Junkie
Media when you did. So. You were there for three
years after you sold for your earnout period, but you
stayed for an extra year, and in your book Work Backwards,
you talk about how you had about a decade of
this low level hum of stress. Why leave when you did?
How did you know it was enough.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
I'm a very intuitive person in terms of my own intuition,
not other people's intuitive. I'm not a psychic doing a reading.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
No.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
I tune into my own and sometimes it's really fricking
annoying because my gut tells me something and my brain
tells me something else, and I always have to listen
to my gut. And I loved almost every minute of
building a business. My co founders and I built the
company up to about sixty or seventy full time staff.
So it was this beast that we had to feed
(05:49):
every day and make sure there's revenue coming in and
there's audiences and ride the up and downs of business.
And towards the end of that journey, I started noticing
personally started to feel a little bit different. So in
my gut when I was walking to work, I would feel,
I'm not as excited to go into work today as
I was last week. That's interesting. And then the next
(06:12):
week I'm still not as excited to go in there.
So I'd really pay attention to how I felt. And
one day I realized the easiest thing to do would
be nothing. The easiest thing to do is in action
and just sit there and have a wonderful life, an
enjoyable life, but not do anything. And that to me
(06:33):
wasn't an option. When you overwork, and when you overthink,
and when you start becoming disengaged, I could feel those
things creeping in, so I wanted to make action before
that they became a permanent thing.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
How did you know that it wouldn't just pass? And
I asked that because I feel like I've had those
moments this year. So I've been doing Inventium, not necessarily
running Inventium, although I stepped into the CEO role for
the last six months, but I had some pretty they
intense moments and definitely hit this period of burnout sort
(07:03):
of earlier this year. But how did you know it
was time to step away as opposed to well this torucial.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Pass yeah, or just just take a break. Yeah, And
sometimes the answer is to just take a break, take
a good holiday. It felt different. It didn't feel like
the normal wear and tear of business that can be
repaired with a two week holiday. Somewhere I was becoming
less engaged with things that would previously engage me. I
started to feel like it was repetitive and my job
(07:33):
up until that point, somehow it felt like a different
job every year because of the way the Internet changed,
the way that media change, which is where my business
was builting. Things just started to feel a bit stale
and I needed to shake things up. And originally I
told my board and my executive team on a Friday
afternoon that I was going to leave after fifteen years.
(07:53):
I got married on the Saturday of that weekend, and
weddings got canceled on the Sunday because this was in
March twenty twenty. It was in the middle of that month,
that week in COVID when everything fell apart. So I
went back into the office on Monday and unquit for
because I couldn't leave the company with all of this
(08:14):
up and down, and then stayed around for about another
six months and then ended up leaving properly about six
months after that.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Oh my god, what timing. Wow. I want to ask
what do you do now for work? Because you're living
in an island off Spain and I think you've been
doing that for about a year or a year and
a half, am I right, yeah, about year and a
half and you're here in Melbourne. We're recording because you're
here for a week. What's your job? What's your work?
Speaker 2 (08:41):
It sounds like one of my family members, of my mum,
who's like, what is your job? What are you doing
back here? I trying to move beyond job titles, and
I find that this is for me is a solution
to my identity being caught up in a job title.
My unofficial title is an optimist who love's big ideas,
and that's kind of how I think about myself because
(09:02):
that's something that's never going to change no matter what
job I do or what job I don't do. So
that's the high level in terms of actual practical level
of what I do. I write books. So my third book,
Work Backwards, came out a few months ago in Australia,
is going to come out in the US and the
UK at the end of this year. When I left Junkie,
I set up a community of independent publishers, and I
(09:23):
set up an industry body. So it's a nonprofit industry
body called the Digital Publishers Alliance, and it's a community
of all the leading independent publishers in the country. And
I do that a couple of days a week as
the chair of that group. And I really love that.
I write and then I consult, end up working about
three days a week and then spend the rest of
the week living on a beach. On a beach. Yeah.
(09:45):
And so we live in Majorca and we swim, we hike.
We've just come from one month traveling through the Alps
where we hired a campavan in Marseille and ended up
in Munich hiking and working a couple of days a
week as well.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
Oh my gosh, like applications open for your job.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
I consider my life an experiment, and I know you
do as well. And I think the most interesting, creative,
curious people do. And there's a privilege to that.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
I want to talk about some of the strategies that
you recommend and that you write about in Work Backwards,
And the first section of the book, which I found
particularly powerful, is around the acronym map standing for meeting
anchors and priorities. And one of the things you write
about in that section is job crafting, which as an
organizational psychologist, I'm deeply familiar with it. But can you
(10:37):
talk to me about how you've used job crafting and
maybe what it is, the different components and how you've
used that for yourself.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
I love job crafting and I love talking to people
about it, especially people like you that really understand the
psychology behind it. And it's such a simple concept, the
idea that we can take our job and craft to
be able to find more meaning in it. Amy Rosnecki
and Jane Dutton, who originally came up with this in
two thousand and one, say that there's three ways that
(11:08):
you can do that. Through the tasks that you do,
through the relationships you have at work, and through the
cognitive reframing or framing of how you think about work.
And it's basically about having an awareness of which areas
of your job do you enjoy, do you get meaning from,
do you get satisfaction from? And which don't you And
(11:28):
how can you dial up or dial down those areas.
I am a relatively late convert to job crafting. It's
been around since two thousand and one, but I've only
really been super conscious of it the last few years
as I researched and thought about this book. So relationship
crafting is a perfect example of you tend to spend
more time with people in your work, so mentors or
colleagues who give you some kind of meaning. And what
(11:50):
I love about job crafting is I think it put
a name on something that is just so innate to
all of us.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Tell me about how you've thought about like one of
those three elements around tasks or relationships or the cognitive
component around how you approach your work, which obviously changed
dramatically in the last few years.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
So when I was at Junkie, I built most of
this business with my co founder Neil, and him and
I have so many complimentary skills, and we crafted all
of those important skills that you need to build a business,
so managing people, managing finances, dealing with problems, and then
specific skills that we had around building media businesses. We
(12:32):
very much divided and conquered the tasks that were necessary
from a very high level management perspective, and that in
a way was us both job crafting our jobs. I
used to think of my own work and think that
about eighty percent of what I do I really love
and about twenty percent I find is really hard. And
I'd look across at my business partner and say, about
(12:52):
twenty percent of the job that he does I like,
and about eighty percent I find really hard. And so
there's a real complementary element of that in that I
was able to dial up those areas of my job
that I got meaning from, which for me was creating
content and building communities and working with editorial teams to
make really interesting, funny, interactive, great content for our audience.
(13:16):
So now that I have complete sway of what I do,
I often joke that, obviously there's a concept of inbox zero.
Get inbox down to zero. I joke that I now
have staff zero. I've got the number of staff I
manage from seventy down to zero. And I tell you what,
staff zero is a wonderful place to be because I
(13:37):
still get things done but I don't manage other people.
I have contractors, I have freelancers, but I'm not responsible
for their career. And feel all of that the hard
part of managing people. And I think that's how I've
crafted my job.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Now that sounds wonderful.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Your eyes lighting up when I talk about that stuff.
Zero and I will.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Say, in case anyone from my team is listening, who knows.
I love my team, but I don't like managing people.
I was talking to my therapist literally a few days ago,
and he said, yeah, people that are people pleases, they
don't make great managers. And I'm like, ah, yeah, okay,
I shouldn't be a manager again, what.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
A great what a great insight. But it's true, manager
people is really hard.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
It's really hard, and I think you just need to
get rid of that desire to be liked if you're
going to be a good manager, which I struggle to
get rid of.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Sorry anyways, well, start zero is something to do.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
Something to yah, Now, talk to me about purpose versus
meaning how are they different when we're thinking about work, Like,
how are they different for you when you think about
what matters to you and what you want to be doing?
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Purpose?
Speaker 1 (14:48):
To me?
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Is a scary word. Purpose is a daunting word. It's
easy for us to talk about business having purpose because
it's not a human being, and businesses should have purpose,
and coming up with and devising what a business as
purpose is is relatively easy because it's not going to
talk back at you. We're giving it its attributes. But
when you start talking about purpose as a human, oh goodness,
I just start to tense up because I don't know
(15:11):
what my life's purpose is. Purpose is scary, and it's
one way to really turn people off sometimes, thinking if
you went up to someone and said, what is your
life purpose? Like, get away from me. That's a really
hard question. So purpose to me is a little bit
scary when it talks about life. But meaning is related
(15:31):
to purpose, but it's a lot easier for us to
grab hold of as humans. Meaning is something that is
relatively easy to understand, relatively soft, and I think it
can be answered for anyone. So the meaning that you
need to really think about is what meaning you get
from work. Doesn't need to be one hundred percent of
(15:52):
your meaning, just what you need to get some meaning
from work, And then what meaning you get outside work,
which is a question that we often don't talk about.
For me, there's a really simple question that you can
ask that answers that, and the question is what are
you proud of? So if I asked someone what are
you proud of? That would start listing off five or
(16:13):
six things. It might be my kids and something they
did that day. It might be my race shoe with
my husband and what we did. It might be a
piece of creative art that I just made, whatever it is.
If you write down a bunch of those answers, then
pull out some of those common threads, you're starting to
get to the core of where someone gets meaning from
(16:34):
outside work. And if you know those two things, that's
really powerful.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
So when you were thinking about this for your own work,
was it like literally writing a laundry list of everything
that you were proud of that you could think of
to do with your work. If we're thinking about what
meaning comes from work as opposed to non work things.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
Yeah, So for meaning at work, I did job crafting,
and I figured out where am I getting my meaning from?
And for me, I realized that this whole area of
community and anytime I do something around that, anytime I
start putting on events, planning events, I get really excited.
Anytime I have to do my finances, do my invoice in,
(17:15):
do my tax I don't get excited. So for me,
I figured out where meaning comes from, but from my
personal life. I started writing out. I wrote out things
like I love hiking. I adore hiking, and so what
is it I love about hiking? I love being out
in nature, like connecting with that. I have a real
deep curiosity around finding a topic and getting slightly obsessive
(17:37):
over it that turns into a book every few years.
That for me is where I get meaning my life
that I've built and how I've been able to build
that life. I'm really proud of that, my relationship with
my husband and with a bunch of my really close friends.
And so once I started to pull that out, I
had this awareness of I should build my life around
(17:57):
a meaning at work is around unity building and be
meaning outside work, prioritizing hiking, prioritizing time with my husband,
prioritizing time to read books and be curious about things.
So that is where I get some of my meaning from.
And Amantha, I'm interested with you. If I asked you
that question, what would you say? Is the question is
(18:20):
what are you proud of.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Like, I'm very proud of my relationship with my daughter
and my partner, and I'm really proud that when things
this year have been very intense and stressful with work,
but I don't think I let it affect those two relationships.
And I had that conversation with my partner Neo and
my daughter Frankie because I knew that I was going
(18:44):
through a bit of a tough time, and they said
that it actually didn't spill over, which for me made
me really proud that I was able to not pollute
those things that are really precious to me, to.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
Keep some real boundaries.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. For work, I'm really proud of this podcast.
I'm proud of my ability to disseminate what I think.
You know, it can be complex ideas and complex science,
and demystify that for the people that consume what I do,
whether that be in you know, the audience of a
keynote speech or listeners of the show, or readers of
my books. It's funny. I thought, like, I'll be able
(19:19):
to reel off a heap of things, but thinking about now,
there must be more. I'm proud of the focus that
I put on my health, that I've still been able
to prioritize making healthy choices and having healthy habits around
sleep and around movement and exercise and what I eat.
And I think that that's often the thing that goes
(19:40):
when people are challenging times. Yeah, so I guess I'm
proud that I've been able to do that. How am
I going to him? Wonder if you give me a score?
Speaker 2 (19:51):
So it's a really illuminating question because your answers really
give insight into do you have meaning outside work? Because
if you came back with just all work things, potentially
the balance in your life between work and life is
too far into work. Whereas your answers around your relationship,
(20:14):
around balance and the boundaries you've been able to build,
that to me says that you do have really strong
sources of meaning outside work, And that is really clarifying
because your sources of meaning are your relationships, your body,
and part of your mind. So I think it's very illuminating,
(20:36):
and you have to be in tuned with what your
answers say.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
What if I didn't say anything about work, Let's just
say I wasn't me and you're sitting down with someone
else and the things that they were proud of, there
was nothing about work. Would you recommend that they change
jobs or what would you recommend?
Speaker 2 (20:51):
No? I actually think that having a list of things
you're proud of outside work that aren't work is wonderful.
That's almost something to aim towards. And this comes back
to two different types of people and how they approach
work and life, the concept of segmentors and integrators. And
I would hesitate to say that someone who's a segmentor,
which Google have shown is roughly one third of people.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
And can you define what that is for those that
have not heard those terms.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Yes, So a segmentor is someone who's able to segment
work and life and able to close down the computer
on a Friday afternoon, not think about work, not reopen
it again until Monday morning comes. It's a wonderful skill
for some people. There are negatives to it, which is
they're generally segmentors are not as flexible as other people segmentors.
(21:37):
If you ask them what they're proud of, generally most
of the answers would be outside work. It would be
I went fishing on the weekend and got a great fish.
And this book I'm reading is really interesting because they're
able to segment work. The majority of people, around two thirds,
are integrators. I'm an integrator, Amantha. You're an integrator. Integrators
are people who are able to integrate work and life life,
(22:00):
sometimes to a benefit because you can have flexibility, and
often to a negative because there is never a time
when work is not on your mind or the computer
cannot be opened. So if it's Sunday at ten o'clock
at night and you want to do some emails, you
will open up your computer and do emails.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Interesting, I'm definitely an integrator. We will be back with
him soon where I ask him how we can all
get better at identifying our values and why he prefers
the term anchors instead. If you're looking for more tips
to improve the way you work can live. I write
(22:40):
a short weekly newsletter that contains tactics I've discovered that
have helped me personally. You can sign up for that
at Amantha dot com. That's Amantha dot Com. I want
to talk about anchors versus values because one of the
(23:00):
things that you write about in the book is around
the importance of finding your anchors. How are anchors different
from values or a kind of the same thing. And
how did you find yours?
Speaker 2 (23:11):
So I like to call them anchors because I feel
that values has been a little bit monopolized by work.
So generally, when you say to somebody you values, we
don't think about them as personal values. We often think
about them as values. Oh yeah, my work has five values.
We should always have integrity, and we should always be respectful,
(23:32):
and we should always be honest and do things together.
And values in the workplace is an amazing thing, and
I love that that has become the main way that
we talk about some of these things, but we often
don't talk as much around personal values. And so I
call them anchors. They are the same as core values.
There's a thousand different ways of doing it, but for me,
I wanted to differentiate it a little bit from work values,
(23:54):
just to give it its own little name. So anchors
or core values, they are three to four things that
really define who you are as a human. Relatively set
in life, it's very hard to change them. They're probably
set by the time you're lateeen or even in your
early twenties, but they're really hard to change. I have
spent years trying to think about myself on what my
(24:17):
anchors are and who I am as a human. But
they became really crystallized when my dad passed away a
few years ago. And one of the ways in which
anyone can think about their own anchors is to look
at people you admire and try to figure out what
is that you admire about them. And I look at
my dad, and he was an optimist, an amazing optimist.
(24:38):
He was extremely fair with all of us, and there
was this amazing sense of giving to people around him.
And you know, he was the president of the school
society and he did this at when we were young kids.
There was this real giving back and a sense of community.
And so I look at my values and my anchors,
which are optimism, fairness, and community. And I see myself
(25:01):
reflected in my father and my mother as well, who
has a lot of these values. But that's where I've
got most of my values from.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
How did you identify them in the first place? You
make it sound so simple here on my three anchors.
I love that. I'm envious. I don't know what mine are.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
What do you think yours are? Well?
Speaker 1 (25:18):
I used to think one of mine was health right,
and then I was listening to a podcast interview. I
think it was Dr m on The Imperfect was talking
about values, and she said, health is not a value.
Health is a means to an end. So what is
the thing that health is giving you. It's about vitality,
for example, or being present. So there went one of
my values. You know, I value curiosity and kindness. There
(25:39):
have been times when I've sat down to try to
think about, Okay, what are my three or four values,
and I've never really landed on them. So I want
to know what was the process that you went through
that got you to what seems like a lot of clarity.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
Yeah, And one of them was having a really big
life defining event happen where I had to kind of
strip away some of the noise, some of the identity,
and some of the safety of all of that. And
that was my father passed away a few years ago.
And that, to me was a real clarifying moment. Around
when you're writing somebody's eulogy, someone you really really love,
(26:13):
you kind of distill their life down into values. You've
got a bit of perspective, and for me it was
what are people going to say about me? What's my legacy?
I also quite like seeing a list of what the
most common values are and just really stopping and thinking
in work backwards. I have a list of the fifty
most common anchors, and I read through all of them
(26:37):
and just stop and think. So take some time out
and figure out which ones resonate with me, which ones don't.
Pull out a couple of those. I also think putting
pressure on yourself to have to find three or four
words that define you. We are complex individuals, and this
is a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy for me
when I think about my own anchors, because I now
(26:59):
know what they are. So optimism is one. I'm an
optimist through and through, but I've only really owned that
properly in the last few years once I've identified it.
Now I say it everywhere. It's the bio on my book.
It says Tim is an optimist. Still, I was thinking
about big ideas. We're hopefully going to have long lives
and our anchors will be with us in the entire lives.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
Okay, you prompted me to do some more thinking about this, Tim,
I think I'm going to steal that optimism one that
definitely that really resonates in terms of even just my
self identity, which I guess is a clue to your anchors.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
And the way that I really saw that one is
looking around at people I admire and see what I
admire about them. I really admire Simon Sinek, the books
he's written, how he communicates. He leads often with he's
an optimist. And I saw that and it resonated with me.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
I really like how you think about work life balance.
I know that it's a term that you don't like
and doesn't resonate. Can you tell me what you think
about instead?
Speaker 2 (27:57):
Work life balance is a term that is used a lot.
I understand why it's used a lot. It makes sense.
It is catchy, and all of us want something to
describe that tension that we feel between work and between
everything else outside it. The reason why I don't like
work life balance is because it puts work and life
on an equal pedestal, as though they're fifty to fifty.
(28:20):
And when you think about what life is, life is
a wide quarto copia of activities that is so much
broader than just something that should be balanced out by work.
Life is your relationships. It is your family, it's your community,
it's your faith, it's your interest, it's your body. It's
your health. It's all these things, which I argue are
(28:42):
way more important than any job will ever be. My
simple way of thinking about it is instead of thinking
about work life balance, flipping it around, so it's life
work balance, and just by putting life first, we're giving
it the importance that it should have, instead of having
work as the ultimate importance and the default way of
thinking about this.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
I like how you add some categories. There are four
things that you think about when you're thinking about Okay,
how am I using my time? Can you talk about
those four things and how you think about that in
your own life in terms of what you do. I
don't want to say your job, but you know your
work stuff and your life.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
Yes, this has been one of the most personally interesting
frameworks because I think about this one all the time.
We can choose how we want to spend our time,
and I've kind of distilled it down into essentially four categories.
Work been one, so open up our computer and doing work.
Spending time in our relationships, so our friends, our family,
(29:43):
our partner, our kids, our grandparents. Spending time on our mind,
which is can be watching TV, it can be hobbies,
it can be playing chess. It can be reading a
book whatever it is, and spending time on our body,
so exercising, cooking, thinking about it, showering, doing all those things.
So work, mind, body, and relationships. And the general way
(30:09):
that we think about things is work is almost always
the number one priority in our lives, and everything else
kind of fits into the rest of it. What should
we be aiming towards. What's the amount of time that
we should be spending on each of those four quadrants.
What I came up with was that we should be
spending roughly a quarter of our time on each of
those four quadrants, so work, mind, body, and relationships. The
(30:31):
reason why this model has been really interesting is because
it challenges me to think of how long am I
spending in my week on my work, which is generally
too much, so dialing that down, But how long am
I actually spending on my mind, my body, and my relationships,
And it's usually less than I should. And so I
then think actively around what are some strategies and what
(30:53):
are some ways that I can dial up some of
those to spend more on them. And that's why the
model has been really challenging.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
And one of the things I really loved about the
book is reading about the different experiments that you'd tried
in terms of how you've flipped various conventions on their
head when it comes to how you approach your work.
I remember one of them was how you decided to
flip the work week and weekends around and I think
you did that experiment with your husband. Maybe can you
(31:20):
talk about that one.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
Yeah, any experiment on work, I've done it. It's been
really freeing to do that. So this one here I
called flipping the work week, which I know is not practical,
and we did it for about six months. It was
actually when we were in campavan traveling around Australia. And
so the general way that we think about work is
that we have traditionally worked five days a week Monday
(31:41):
to Friday, and we have two days off Sunday and Sunday.
And what I thought about was what would happen if
we flipped the work week? What if we worked Monday
and Tuesday two days a week, and then took off
from Wednesday to Sunday. And it was a really interesting
experiment because obviously we're going to be working less. We
were in the Campa Van, we would stop at an
Airbnb or a hotel and checking on a Sunday night
(32:04):
and check out on a Tuesday or Wednesday, and we
would work really intensely for two days. It was productive.
I probably got about as much focused work done in
two days as I would have done in about four days.
It was just that I'm going to focus, I'm going
to minimize meetings. And it showed me how much fath
(32:26):
there was in a workplace. It also showed me how
much I miss some of the camaraderie and some of
the friendships that you get. But it was a really
interesting experiment.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
What other experiments have you brown that have taught you
some really useful lessons.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
So I'm currently working three days a week, so for me, that.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
Is increased your work time by fifty and for me,
that's a really nice mix that works for me.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
So I've experimented with five day weeks, with four day weeks,
with two day weeks, and now I'm settled in it
three day week and I think that works really nicely.
I have experimented as a full time remote worker, so
working completely remote. So my husband and I spent six
months living in Darwin. We worked fully remote there five
days a week. And there's some wonderful benefits that come
(33:16):
from fully remote working, and there's also some drawbacks. So
we really missed being part of a community. And when
you're doing that five days a week, it's quite hard
doing remote working that whole time. You do miss that
sense of being around other people.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
I had a meeting with someone earlier who I'm collaborating
with on a project outside of invent him, and he
does a three day week. He's kind of semi retired
as a partner from one of the Big four and
this is every week is Easter, and I love that
for you. How does this three day week work like they?
Are they the same days? Are they eight hour days?
Speaker 2 (33:51):
To give me more details, Yeah, And so I'll give
two examples because my husband and I, because he works
full time completely remote for a company from Spain, I
work three days a week for myself. So it's slightly
different because I can determine my own hours. But what
we have decided as a couple is that we will
align our schedules as much as possible because that means
(34:13):
the meaning we get outside work. So generally we wake
up quite early, so we start work about six am
in the morning and go through to about two o'clock
in the afternoon, so it's a full eight hour day
from Monday to Wednesday. So the same time every week
in Spain, it's two o'clock in the afternoon, the sun
is shining, the payella is cooking, the beach is calling,
(34:36):
and we then go out for a hike or a
swim or sometimes just flop on the couch. At two
o'clock in the afternoon, go and have lunch and do
stuff together, and we have each afternoon an evening. Therefore, Monday, Tuesday,
Wednesday we have relatively early nights. We go to bed early,
and then it gets to Wednesday afternoon and the work
week is finished. The amount of crossover time we have
(34:57):
with Australia, so from six am in the morning is
normally about currently in summer about two o'clock in the
afternoon in Australia, so we've got three or four hours
each day. And what that also does is that cuts
a lot of the fath out of meetings, so we
can't spend our day in meetings, so instead we have
meetings from six am till nine am ish Australia time,
(35:18):
and then I've got from nine till two just to
do work, to think, to do deep work, and that's
quite lovely. Wow, come and join me.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
I'm thinking, I'm thinking, how do I do that? How
do I transport my daughter into school in Spain?
Speaker 2 (35:33):
No?
Speaker 1 (35:33):
No, in all seriousness, I'm putting myself in your shoes.
Or rather, I'm thinking, what does that would mean. I
struggle with this now in Melbourne in my work life,
because I genuinely love my work and I kind of
like I could just keep working, and I really have
to make a conscious effort to stop work. And one
of the things that I've done I've changed a few
(35:53):
of my habits around after sort of hitting a low
point in June. And I have a rule for myself.
I've got a room in the house. It's the home
office and studio, and that's separate to the rest of
the house. And I leave my laptop in the study
as opposed to just taking it down into the living area,
where it's really easy to re engage in work after
(36:16):
the workday has ended, say at five or five thirty.
So just it stays there when I finish the day.
And that's been quite good. But I want to know
for you, how, particularly given that we're both integrators. How
do you actually stop at two o'clock?
Speaker 2 (36:30):
Yeah, for me, it's about external factors. So my husband,
who's a segmentor is something that makes me stop work.
I imagine children and responsibilities and childcare also pulls people away.
I know where I get meaning from, and I make
appointments with myself and with external people, with friends to say,
(36:51):
I need to make sure that I'm going to go
to the gym at two o'clock because I have a
class booked and that's what pulls me away from work.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
I like that a lot. That is a good strategy
having other things are the commitments that force you away
from work? Yes, and I'm totally going to try.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
That, especially ones that are related to things you find meaningful.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
I want to also ask in the context of experiments
that you've done. I know you've thought a lot about
career breaks and sabbaticals, and I've been doing inventing for
seventeen years. I've got some long service leaf built up
that I haven't used yet. Tell me what experiments have
you ran in that regard and what would you recommend
I do.
Speaker 2 (37:29):
Have you taken a career break?
Speaker 1 (37:32):
No, I have not, haven't stopped.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
I think it's high time that you did. But genuinely
think that and for somebody who's an integrator, career break
doesn't need to mean a complete break from everything that
you'd like thinking about. What it does mean is having
something to look forward to that's going to be a
bit of a circuit breaker to your life, and that
(37:58):
is where you can have time away to think of
new book ideas, to think of guests you want to
have on your podcast, to think of all those things
that you get meaning from with your daughter and with
your relationships and with your partner. Prioritizing all of that
within a career break, and a career break is once
again a really personal thing for many people. I recommend
(38:19):
that people take career breaks once every decade and a
half if you can. The idea of just stepping away
from work for a period or from irresponsibilities, and it's
not just a holiday, it's thinking a little bit more
consciously about what you want to get out of it.
I do love that in career breaks, there's actually researchers
have identified three different types of career breaks. There is
(38:41):
a working holiday where you do some work as you
are there, and you generally come back into your same profession.
There's a free dive, which is where you really dive
into something else or something completely different. And there's a quest,
which is where you need to seek out something spiritually
a bit higher, and so thinking throughously before you do
(39:01):
it which type of career break you want is probably
the best way of doing it.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
I'm so inspired to sit down and think about this, Tim.
I feel like I could just keep talking to you
for another eight hours, but then I mean you'd have
to clock off before then anyway. But Tim, thank you
so much. I'm so glad we could organize this conversation
for when you're in Melbourne. It's just been a joy
and very inspiring for me.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
Thank you, Mantha. I've loved it as well.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
I hope you loved this chat with Tim as much
as I did. I left feeling so inspired by what
he's achieved in his own life and left me thinking
a lot about how I could challenge some of the
rules and assumptions that are placed upon work and what
work is meant to look like. I haven't quite reached
any answers for myself yet, but it started a conversation
(39:48):
in my head. And if you want to learn more
about Tim. I highly recommend his book Work Backwards, which
unpacks a lot more concepts about how we can approach
work and life quite differently. If you like today's show,
make sure you hit follow on your podcast app to
be alerted when new episodes drop. How I Work was
(40:09):
recorded on the traditional land of the Warrangery people, part
of the Kola Nation. A big thank you to my
editor Rowena Murray and Martin Nimmer for doing the sound mix.
Do you ever feel like you're stuck in an endless
cycle of work with no time for what truly matters?
Meet Tim Duggan, a former CEO who's flipped the script
on traditional work life balance. After he sold his media company,
Tim didn't just retire to a beach. He reimagined his
(00:24):
entire approach to work and life. Tim now lives on
an island of Spain, and he has cracked the code
to working just three days a week while still achieving
his goals. But how did he get there, and more importantly,
how can you apply his strategies to your own life.
(00:45):
In this episode, Tim reveals his unconventional methods for finding
meaning both in and outside of work, and he shares
some very practical tips for crafting a career that aligns
with your core values. Welcome to How I Work, a
(01:05):
show about habits, rituals, and strategies for optimizing your day.
I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imber. In Tim's latest book,
Work Backwards, he jokes that his surname may as well
have been from Junkie Tim from Junkie, which was the
company Tim sold in twenty sixteen, Junkie Media. Tim wrote
(01:26):
about how his self identity was so wrapped up in
his work, so I wanted to know how on earth
did he go about disentangling it.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
It's quite an exotic surname from Junkie. I don't know
what nationality that is, but I was introduced on a
Monday morning in a meeting, this is Tim from Junkie,
And on a Friday night down at the pub, this
is Tim from Junkie. And on Sunday morning, when I'm
on the internet, this is Tim from Junkie. That it
was so much a part of my identity, this business
(01:56):
that I'd spent fifteen years building with my friends, that
I wasn't prepared for how hard the landing was going
to be once I was no longer Tim from Junkie.
It was way harder than I thought, and I didn't
have any pre awareness that I was going to wake
up one day and I left in the middle of COVID.
(02:17):
It was in the peak of COVID. It was in
mid twenty twenty, and my final meeting with all my
staff was a Zoom meeting on my final day, and
it was five o'clock on a Friday afternoon, and I
was talking into the tiny green light that was flashing
on my computer and then we said our goodbyes. This
was our virtual drinks, and I closed my laptop and
(02:38):
I was alone in my home office on a Friday afternoon.
I was like, Oh, this is it. That's the end
of that identity. It was a really, really strange way
to close off that part of my life. Originally my
plan was to do something to shake things up, so
just change my landscape. Changed my mind, and that was
to move overseas. After fifteen plus year have been married
(03:00):
to my business and not been able to move overseas,
and so my husband and I had been planning for
this for years. The decision to sell a business took
a few years. Then we sold the business in twenty sixteen.
I had what's known as an urnout, which means I
had to work for the company that bought us for
three years. I ended up doing that for an extra year,
and then COVID happened, so we jumped into a campavan
(03:22):
and we drove as far as we could, which was
the new South Wales state border because that was all
that was open at the time, and we had six
weeks in a camp of van and then that turned
into six months, so we just started driving and we
didn't stop. And it was during that moment where I
had a change of scenery, I had a change of routine.
(03:42):
I had a change of mindset, a change of responsibility.
That was when I kind of started to rebuild and
think about who I was if I wasn't from junkie.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Were there conscious steps that you took, like say, during
that six months to really reform your identity.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
I didn't realize how discombobulating it was going to be,
so I consciously changed my routine. I consciously changed what
I was seeing in terms of the landscape in front
of me. I actually wish that I had gone into
it with some kind of plan, because I'm very organized
and I like plans, and I like experiments, and I
(04:23):
like writing things down. I was caught off guard with
how much of my identity was caught up with my work.
I needed to have something that made me feel like
I was still contributing mentally. So I began writing my
second book, which was called Killer Thinking all about creativity
in the workplace. And I wrote most of that from
the back of the campavan. And that's because I needed
(04:43):
something to do. I couldn't just completely switch off I'm
not someone who can go and flop and drop on
a beach and just spend six months staring into the
sun and just daydreaming. I needed to have a project,
and so for me, it was writing a book.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
I want to know about the decision to leave Junkie
Media when you did. So. You were there for three
years after you sold for your earnout period, but you
stayed for an extra year, and in your book Work Backwards,
you talk about how you had about a decade of
this low level hum of stress. Why leave when you did?
How did you know it was enough.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
I'm a very intuitive person in terms of my own intuition,
not other people's intuitive. I'm not a psychic doing a reading.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
No.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
I tune into my own and sometimes it's really fricking
annoying because my gut tells me something and my brain
tells me something else, and I always have to listen
to my gut. And I loved almost every minute of
building a business. My co founders and I built the
company up to about sixty or seventy full time staff.
So it was this beast that we had to feed
(05:49):
every day and make sure there's revenue coming in and
there's audiences and ride the up and downs of business.
And towards the end of that journey, I started noticing
personally started to feel a little bit different. So in
my gut when I was walking to work, I would feel,
I'm not as excited to go into work today as
I was last week. That's interesting. And then the next
(06:12):
week I'm still not as excited to go in there.
So I'd really pay attention to how I felt. And
one day I realized the easiest thing to do would
be nothing. The easiest thing to do is in action
and just sit there and have a wonderful life, an
enjoyable life, but not do anything. And that to me
(06:33):
wasn't an option. When you overwork, and when you overthink,
and when you start becoming disengaged, I could feel those
things creeping in, so I wanted to make action before
that they became a permanent thing.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
How did you know that it wouldn't just pass? And
I asked that because I feel like I've had those
moments this year. So I've been doing Inventium, not necessarily
running Inventium, although I stepped into the CEO role for
the last six months, but I had some pretty they
intense moments and definitely hit this period of burnout sort
(07:03):
of earlier this year. But how did you know it
was time to step away as opposed to well this torucial.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Pass yeah, or just just take a break. Yeah, And
sometimes the answer is to just take a break, take
a good holiday. It felt different. It didn't feel like
the normal wear and tear of business that can be
repaired with a two week holiday. Somewhere I was becoming
less engaged with things that would previously engage me. I
started to feel like it was repetitive and my job
(07:33):
up until that point, somehow it felt like a different
job every year because of the way the Internet changed,
the way that media change, which is where my business
was builting. Things just started to feel a bit stale
and I needed to shake things up. And originally I
told my board and my executive team on a Friday
afternoon that I was going to leave after fifteen years.
(07:53):
I got married on the Saturday of that weekend, and
weddings got canceled on the Sunday because this was in
March twenty twenty. It was in the middle of that month,
that week in COVID when everything fell apart. So I
went back into the office on Monday and unquit for
because I couldn't leave the company with all of this
(08:14):
up and down, and then stayed around for about another
six months and then ended up leaving properly about six
months after that.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Oh my god, what timing. Wow. I want to ask
what do you do now for work? Because you're living
in an island off Spain and I think you've been
doing that for about a year or a year and
a half, am I right, yeah, about year and a
half and you're here in Melbourne. We're recording because you're
here for a week. What's your job? What's your work?
Speaker 2 (08:41):
It sounds like one of my family members, of my mum,
who's like, what is your job? What are you doing
back here? I trying to move beyond job titles, and
I find that this is for me is a solution
to my identity being caught up in a job title.
My unofficial title is an optimist who love's big ideas,
and that's kind of how I think about myself because
(09:02):
that's something that's never going to change no matter what
job I do or what job I don't do. So
that's the high level in terms of actual practical level
of what I do. I write books. So my third book,
Work Backwards, came out a few months ago in Australia,
is going to come out in the US and the
UK at the end of this year. When I left Junkie,
I set up a community of independent publishers, and I
(09:23):
set up an industry body. So it's a nonprofit industry
body called the Digital Publishers Alliance, and it's a community
of all the leading independent publishers in the country. And
I do that a couple of days a week as
the chair of that group. And I really love that.
I write and then I consult, end up working about
three days a week and then spend the rest of
the week living on a beach. On a beach. Yeah.
(09:45):
And so we live in Majorca and we swim, we hike.
We've just come from one month traveling through the Alps
where we hired a campavan in Marseille and ended up
in Munich hiking and working a couple of days a
week as well.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
Oh my gosh, like applications open for your job.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
I consider my life an experiment, and I know you
do as well. And I think the most interesting, creative,
curious people do. And there's a privilege to that.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
I want to talk about some of the strategies that
you recommend and that you write about in Work Backwards,
And the first section of the book, which I found
particularly powerful, is around the acronym map standing for meeting
anchors and priorities. And one of the things you write
about in that section is job crafting, which as an
organizational psychologist, I'm deeply familiar with it. But can you
(10:37):
talk to me about how you've used job crafting and
maybe what it is, the different components and how you've
used that for yourself.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
I love job crafting and I love talking to people
about it, especially people like you that really understand the
psychology behind it. And it's such a simple concept, the
idea that we can take our job and craft to
be able to find more meaning in it. Amy Rosnecki
and Jane Dutton, who originally came up with this in
two thousand and one, say that there's three ways that
(11:08):
you can do that. Through the tasks that you do,
through the relationships you have at work, and through the
cognitive reframing or framing of how you think about work.
And it's basically about having an awareness of which areas
of your job do you enjoy, do you get meaning from,
do you get satisfaction from? And which don't you And
(11:28):
how can you dial up or dial down those areas.
I am a relatively late convert to job crafting. It's
been around since two thousand and one, but I've only
really been super conscious of it the last few years
as I researched and thought about this book. So relationship
crafting is a perfect example of you tend to spend
more time with people in your work, so mentors or
colleagues who give you some kind of meaning. And what
(11:50):
I love about job crafting is I think it put
a name on something that is just so innate to
all of us.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Tell me about how you've thought about like one of
those three elements around tasks or relationships or the cognitive
component around how you approach your work, which obviously changed
dramatically in the last few years.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
So when I was at Junkie, I built most of
this business with my co founder Neil, and him and
I have so many complimentary skills, and we crafted all
of those important skills that you need to build a business,
so managing people, managing finances, dealing with problems, and then
specific skills that we had around building media businesses. We
(12:32):
very much divided and conquered the tasks that were necessary
from a very high level management perspective, and that in
a way was us both job crafting our jobs. I
used to think of my own work and think that
about eighty percent of what I do I really love
and about twenty percent I find is really hard. And
I'd look across at my business partner and say, about
(12:52):
twenty percent of the job that he does I like,
and about eighty percent I find really hard. And so
there's a real complementary element of that in that I
was able to dial up those areas of my job
that I got meaning from, which for me was creating
content and building communities and working with editorial teams to
make really interesting, funny, interactive, great content for our audience.
(13:16):
So now that I have complete sway of what I do,
I often joke that, obviously there's a concept of inbox zero.
Get inbox down to zero. I joke that I now
have staff zero. I've got the number of staff I
manage from seventy down to zero. And I tell you what,
staff zero is a wonderful place to be because I
(13:37):
still get things done but I don't manage other people.
I have contractors, I have freelancers, but I'm not responsible
for their career. And feel all of that the hard
part of managing people. And I think that's how I've
crafted my job.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Now that sounds wonderful.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Your eyes lighting up when I talk about that stuff.
Zero and I will.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Say, in case anyone from my team is listening, who knows.
I love my team, but I don't like managing people.
I was talking to my therapist literally a few days ago,
and he said, yeah, people that are people pleases, they
don't make great managers. And I'm like, ah, yeah, okay,
I shouldn't be a manager again, what.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
A great what a great insight. But it's true, manager
people is really hard.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
It's really hard, and I think you just need to
get rid of that desire to be liked if you're
going to be a good manager, which I struggle to
get rid of.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Sorry anyways, well, start zero is something to do.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
Something to yah, Now, talk to me about purpose versus
meaning how are they different when we're thinking about work, Like,
how are they different for you when you think about
what matters to you and what you want to be doing?
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Purpose?
Speaker 1 (14:48):
To me?
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Is a scary word. Purpose is a daunting word. It's
easy for us to talk about business having purpose because
it's not a human being, and businesses should have purpose,
and coming up with and devising what a business as
purpose is is relatively easy because it's not going to
talk back at you. We're giving it its attributes. But
when you start talking about purpose as a human, oh goodness,
I just start to tense up because I don't know
(15:11):
what my life's purpose is. Purpose is scary, and it's
one way to really turn people off sometimes, thinking if
you went up to someone and said, what is your
life purpose? Like, get away from me. That's a really
hard question. So purpose to me is a little bit
scary when it talks about life. But meaning is related
(15:31):
to purpose, but it's a lot easier for us to
grab hold of as humans. Meaning is something that is
relatively easy to understand, relatively soft, and I think it
can be answered for anyone. So the meaning that you
need to really think about is what meaning you get
from work. Doesn't need to be one hundred percent of
(15:52):
your meaning, just what you need to get some meaning
from work, And then what meaning you get outside work,
which is a question that we often don't talk about.
For me, there's a really simple question that you can
ask that answers that, and the question is what are
you proud of? So if I asked someone what are
you proud of? That would start listing off five or
(16:13):
six things. It might be my kids and something they
did that day. It might be my race shoe with
my husband and what we did. It might be a
piece of creative art that I just made, whatever it is.
If you write down a bunch of those answers, then
pull out some of those common threads, you're starting to
get to the core of where someone gets meaning from
(16:34):
outside work. And if you know those two things, that's
really powerful.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
So when you were thinking about this for your own work,
was it like literally writing a laundry list of everything
that you were proud of that you could think of
to do with your work. If we're thinking about what
meaning comes from work as opposed to non work things.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
Yeah, So for meaning at work, I did job crafting,
and I figured out where am I getting my meaning from?
And for me, I realized that this whole area of
community and anytime I do something around that, anytime I
start putting on events, planning events, I get really excited.
Anytime I have to do my finances, do my invoice in,
(17:15):
do my tax I don't get excited. So for me,
I figured out where meaning comes from, but from my
personal life. I started writing out. I wrote out things
like I love hiking. I adore hiking, and so what
is it I love about hiking? I love being out
in nature, like connecting with that. I have a real
deep curiosity around finding a topic and getting slightly obsessive
(17:37):
over it that turns into a book every few years.
That for me is where I get meaning my life
that I've built and how I've been able to build
that life. I'm really proud of that, my relationship with
my husband and with a bunch of my really close friends.
And so once I started to pull that out, I
had this awareness of I should build my life around
(17:57):
a meaning at work is around unity building and be
meaning outside work, prioritizing hiking, prioritizing time with my husband,
prioritizing time to read books and be curious about things.
So that is where I get some of my meaning from.
And Amantha, I'm interested with you. If I asked you
that question, what would you say? Is the question is
(18:20):
what are you proud of.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Like, I'm very proud of my relationship with my daughter
and my partner, and I'm really proud that when things
this year have been very intense and stressful with work,
but I don't think I let it affect those two relationships.
And I had that conversation with my partner Neo and
my daughter Frankie because I knew that I was going
(18:44):
through a bit of a tough time, and they said
that it actually didn't spill over, which for me made
me really proud that I was able to not pollute
those things that are really precious to me, to.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
Keep some real boundaries.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. For work, I'm really proud of this podcast.
I'm proud of my ability to disseminate what I think.
You know, it can be complex ideas and complex science,
and demystify that for the people that consume what I do,
whether that be in you know, the audience of a
keynote speech or listeners of the show, or readers of
my books. It's funny. I thought, like, I'll be able
(19:19):
to reel off a heap of things, but thinking about now,
there must be more. I'm proud of the focus that
I put on my health, that I've still been able
to prioritize making healthy choices and having healthy habits around
sleep and around movement and exercise and what I eat.
And I think that that's often the thing that goes
(19:40):
when people are challenging times. Yeah, so I guess I'm
proud that I've been able to do that. How am
I going to him? Wonder if you give me a score?
Speaker 2 (19:51):
So it's a really illuminating question because your answers really
give insight into do you have meaning outside work? Because
if you came back with just all work things, potentially
the balance in your life between work and life is
too far into work. Whereas your answers around your relationship,
(20:14):
around balance and the boundaries you've been able to build,
that to me says that you do have really strong
sources of meaning outside work, And that is really clarifying
because your sources of meaning are your relationships, your body,
and part of your mind. So I think it's very illuminating,
(20:36):
and you have to be in tuned with what your
answers say.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
What if I didn't say anything about work, Let's just
say I wasn't me and you're sitting down with someone
else and the things that they were proud of, there
was nothing about work. Would you recommend that they change
jobs or what would you recommend?
Speaker 2 (20:51):
No? I actually think that having a list of things
you're proud of outside work that aren't work is wonderful.
That's almost something to aim towards. And this comes back
to two different types of people and how they approach
work and life, the concept of segmentors and integrators. And
I would hesitate to say that someone who's a segmentor,
which Google have shown is roughly one third of people.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
And can you define what that is for those that
have not heard those terms.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Yes, So a segmentor is someone who's able to segment
work and life and able to close down the computer
on a Friday afternoon, not think about work, not reopen
it again until Monday morning comes. It's a wonderful skill
for some people. There are negatives to it, which is
they're generally segmentors are not as flexible as other people segmentors.
(21:37):
If you ask them what they're proud of, generally most
of the answers would be outside work. It would be
I went fishing on the weekend and got a great fish.
And this book I'm reading is really interesting because they're
able to segment work. The majority of people, around two thirds,
are integrators. I'm an integrator, Amantha. You're an integrator. Integrators
are people who are able to integrate work and life life,
(22:00):
sometimes to a benefit because you can have flexibility, and
often to a negative because there is never a time
when work is not on your mind or the computer
cannot be opened. So if it's Sunday at ten o'clock
at night and you want to do some emails, you
will open up your computer and do emails.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Interesting, I'm definitely an integrator. We will be back with
him soon where I ask him how we can all
get better at identifying our values and why he prefers
the term anchors instead. If you're looking for more tips
to improve the way you work can live. I write
(22:40):
a short weekly newsletter that contains tactics I've discovered that
have helped me personally. You can sign up for that
at Amantha dot com. That's Amantha dot Com. I want
to talk about anchors versus values because one of the
(23:00):
things that you write about in the book is around
the importance of finding your anchors. How are anchors different
from values or a kind of the same thing. And
how did you find yours?
Speaker 2 (23:11):
So I like to call them anchors because I feel
that values has been a little bit monopolized by work.
So generally, when you say to somebody you values, we
don't think about them as personal values. We often think
about them as values. Oh yeah, my work has five values.
We should always have integrity, and we should always be respectful,
(23:32):
and we should always be honest and do things together.
And values in the workplace is an amazing thing, and
I love that that has become the main way that
we talk about some of these things, but we often
don't talk as much around personal values. And so I
call them anchors. They are the same as core values.
There's a thousand different ways of doing it, but for me,
I wanted to differentiate it a little bit from work values,
(23:54):
just to give it its own little name. So anchors
or core values, they are three to four things that
really define who you are as a human. Relatively set
in life, it's very hard to change them. They're probably
set by the time you're lateeen or even in your
early twenties, but they're really hard to change. I have
spent years trying to think about myself on what my
(24:17):
anchors are and who I am as a human. But
they became really crystallized when my dad passed away a
few years ago. And one of the ways in which
anyone can think about their own anchors is to look
at people you admire and try to figure out what
is that you admire about them. And I look at
my dad, and he was an optimist, an amazing optimist.
(24:38):
He was extremely fair with all of us, and there
was this amazing sense of giving to people around him.
And you know, he was the president of the school
society and he did this at when we were young kids.
There was this real giving back and a sense of community.
And so I look at my values and my anchors,
which are optimism, fairness, and community. And I see myself
(25:01):
reflected in my father and my mother as well, who
has a lot of these values. But that's where I've
got most of my values from.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
How did you identify them in the first place? You
make it sound so simple here on my three anchors.
I love that. I'm envious. I don't know what mine are.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
What do you think yours are? Well?
Speaker 1 (25:18):
I used to think one of mine was health right,
and then I was listening to a podcast interview. I
think it was Dr m on The Imperfect was talking
about values, and she said, health is not a value.
Health is a means to an end. So what is
the thing that health is giving you. It's about vitality,
for example, or being present. So there went one of
my values. You know, I value curiosity and kindness. There
(25:39):
have been times when I've sat down to try to
think about, Okay, what are my three or four values,
and I've never really landed on them. So I want
to know what was the process that you went through
that got you to what seems like a lot of clarity.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
Yeah, And one of them was having a really big
life defining event happen where I had to kind of
strip away some of the noise, some of the identity,
and some of the safety of all of that. And
that was my father passed away a few years ago.
And that, to me was a real clarifying moment. Around
when you're writing somebody's eulogy, someone you really really love,
(26:13):
you kind of distill their life down into values. You've
got a bit of perspective, and for me it was
what are people going to say about me? What's my legacy?
I also quite like seeing a list of what the
most common values are and just really stopping and thinking
in work backwards. I have a list of the fifty
most common anchors, and I read through all of them
(26:37):
and just stop and think. So take some time out
and figure out which ones resonate with me, which ones don't.
Pull out a couple of those. I also think putting
pressure on yourself to have to find three or four
words that define you. We are complex individuals, and this
is a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy for me
when I think about my own anchors, because I now
(26:59):
know what they are. So optimism is one. I'm an
optimist through and through, but I've only really owned that
properly in the last few years once I've identified it.
Now I say it everywhere. It's the bio on my book.
It says Tim is an optimist. Still, I was thinking
about big ideas. We're hopefully going to have long lives
and our anchors will be with us in the entire lives.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
Okay, you prompted me to do some more thinking about this, Tim,
I think I'm going to steal that optimism one that
definitely that really resonates in terms of even just my
self identity, which I guess is a clue to your anchors.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
And the way that I really saw that one is
looking around at people I admire and see what I
admire about them. I really admire Simon Sinek, the books
he's written, how he communicates. He leads often with he's
an optimist. And I saw that and it resonated with me.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
I really like how you think about work life balance.
I know that it's a term that you don't like
and doesn't resonate. Can you tell me what you think
about instead?
Speaker 2 (27:57):
Work life balance is a term that is used a lot.
I understand why it's used a lot. It makes sense.
It is catchy, and all of us want something to
describe that tension that we feel between work and between
everything else outside it. The reason why I don't like
work life balance is because it puts work and life
on an equal pedestal, as though they're fifty to fifty.
(28:20):
And when you think about what life is, life is
a wide quarto copia of activities that is so much
broader than just something that should be balanced out by work.
Life is your relationships. It is your family, it's your community,
it's your faith, it's your interest, it's your body. It's
your health. It's all these things, which I argue are
(28:42):
way more important than any job will ever be. My
simple way of thinking about it is instead of thinking
about work life balance, flipping it around, so it's life
work balance, and just by putting life first, we're giving
it the importance that it should have, instead of having
work as the ultimate importance and the default way of
thinking about this.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
I like how you add some categories. There are four
things that you think about when you're thinking about Okay,
how am I using my time? Can you talk about
those four things and how you think about that in
your own life in terms of what you do. I
don't want to say your job, but you know your
work stuff and your life.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
Yes, this has been one of the most personally interesting
frameworks because I think about this one all the time.
We can choose how we want to spend our time,
and I've kind of distilled it down into essentially four categories.
Work been one, so open up our computer and doing work.
Spending time in our relationships, so our friends, our family,
(29:43):
our partner, our kids, our grandparents. Spending time on our mind,
which is can be watching TV, it can be hobbies,
it can be playing chess. It can be reading a
book whatever it is, and spending time on our body,
so exercising, cooking, thinking about it, showering, doing all those things.
So work, mind, body, and relationships. And the general way
(30:09):
that we think about things is work is almost always
the number one priority in our lives, and everything else
kind of fits into the rest of it. What should
we be aiming towards. What's the amount of time that
we should be spending on each of those four quadrants.
What I came up with was that we should be
spending roughly a quarter of our time on each of
those four quadrants, so work, mind, body, and relationships. The
(30:31):
reason why this model has been really interesting is because
it challenges me to think of how long am I
spending in my week on my work, which is generally
too much, so dialing that down, But how long am
I actually spending on my mind, my body, and my relationships,
And it's usually less than I should. And so I
then think actively around what are some strategies and what
(30:53):
are some ways that I can dial up some of
those to spend more on them. And that's why the
model has been really challenging.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
And one of the things I really loved about the
book is reading about the different experiments that you'd tried
in terms of how you've flipped various conventions on their
head when it comes to how you approach your work.
I remember one of them was how you decided to
flip the work week and weekends around and I think
you did that experiment with your husband. Maybe can you
(31:20):
talk about that one.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
Yeah, any experiment on work, I've done it. It's been
really freeing to do that. So this one here I
called flipping the work week, which I know is not practical,
and we did it for about six months. It was
actually when we were in campavan traveling around Australia. And
so the general way that we think about work is
that we have traditionally worked five days a week Monday
(31:41):
to Friday, and we have two days off Sunday and Sunday.
And what I thought about was what would happen if
we flipped the work week? What if we worked Monday
and Tuesday two days a week, and then took off
from Wednesday to Sunday. And it was a really interesting
experiment because obviously we're going to be working less. We
were in the Campa Van, we would stop at an
Airbnb or a hotel and checking on a Sunday night
(32:04):
and check out on a Tuesday or Wednesday, and we
would work really intensely for two days. It was productive.
I probably got about as much focused work done in
two days as I would have done in about four days.
It was just that I'm going to focus, I'm going
to minimize meetings. And it showed me how much fath
(32:26):
there was in a workplace. It also showed me how
much I miss some of the camaraderie and some of
the friendships that you get. But it was a really
interesting experiment.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
What other experiments have you brown that have taught you
some really useful lessons.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
So I'm currently working three days a week, so for me, that.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
Is increased your work time by fifty and for me,
that's a really nice mix that works for me.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
So I've experimented with five day weeks, with four day weeks,
with two day weeks, and now I'm settled in it
three day week and I think that works really nicely.
I have experimented as a full time remote worker, so
working completely remote. So my husband and I spent six
months living in Darwin. We worked fully remote there five
days a week. And there's some wonderful benefits that come
(33:16):
from fully remote working, and there's also some drawbacks. So
we really missed being part of a community. And when
you're doing that five days a week, it's quite hard
doing remote working that whole time. You do miss that
sense of being around other people.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
I had a meeting with someone earlier who I'm collaborating
with on a project outside of invent him, and he
does a three day week. He's kind of semi retired
as a partner from one of the Big four and
this is every week is Easter, and I love that
for you. How does this three day week work like they?
Are they the same days? Are they eight hour days?
Speaker 2 (33:51):
To give me more details, Yeah, And so I'll give
two examples because my husband and I, because he works
full time completely remote for a company from Spain, I
work three days a week for myself. So it's slightly
different because I can determine my own hours. But what
we have decided as a couple is that we will
align our schedules as much as possible because that means
(34:13):
the meaning we get outside work. So generally we wake
up quite early, so we start work about six am
in the morning and go through to about two o'clock
in the afternoon, so it's a full eight hour day
from Monday to Wednesday. So the same time every week
in Spain, it's two o'clock in the afternoon, the sun
is shining, the payella is cooking, the beach is calling,
(34:36):
and we then go out for a hike or a
swim or sometimes just flop on the couch. At two
o'clock in the afternoon, go and have lunch and do
stuff together, and we have each afternoon an evening. Therefore, Monday, Tuesday,
Wednesday we have relatively early nights. We go to bed early,
and then it gets to Wednesday afternoon and the work
week is finished. The amount of crossover time we have
(34:57):
with Australia, so from six am in the morning is
normally about currently in summer about two o'clock in the
afternoon in Australia, so we've got three or four hours
each day. And what that also does is that cuts
a lot of the fath out of meetings, so we
can't spend our day in meetings, so instead we have
meetings from six am till nine am ish Australia time,
(35:18):
and then I've got from nine till two just to
do work, to think, to do deep work, and that's
quite lovely. Wow, come and join me.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
I'm thinking, I'm thinking, how do I do that? How
do I transport my daughter into school in Spain?
Speaker 2 (35:33):
No?
Speaker 1 (35:33):
No, in all seriousness, I'm putting myself in your shoes.
Or rather, I'm thinking, what does that would mean. I
struggle with this now in Melbourne in my work life,
because I genuinely love my work and I kind of
like I could just keep working, and I really have
to make a conscious effort to stop work. And one
of the things that I've done I've changed a few
(35:53):
of my habits around after sort of hitting a low
point in June. And I have a rule for myself.
I've got a room in the house. It's the home
office and studio, and that's separate to the rest of
the house. And I leave my laptop in the study
as opposed to just taking it down into the living area,
where it's really easy to re engage in work after
(36:16):
the workday has ended, say at five or five thirty.
So just it stays there when I finish the day.
And that's been quite good. But I want to know
for you, how, particularly given that we're both integrators. How
do you actually stop at two o'clock?
Speaker 2 (36:30):
Yeah, for me, it's about external factors. So my husband,
who's a segmentor is something that makes me stop work.
I imagine children and responsibilities and childcare also pulls people away.
I know where I get meaning from, and I make
appointments with myself and with external people, with friends to say,
(36:51):
I need to make sure that I'm going to go
to the gym at two o'clock because I have a
class booked and that's what pulls me away from work.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
I like that a lot. That is a good strategy
having other things are the commitments that force you away
from work? Yes, and I'm totally going to try.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
That, especially ones that are related to things you find meaningful.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
I want to also ask in the context of experiments
that you've done. I know you've thought a lot about
career breaks and sabbaticals, and I've been doing inventing for
seventeen years. I've got some long service leaf built up
that I haven't used yet. Tell me what experiments have
you ran in that regard and what would you recommend
I do.
Speaker 2 (37:29):
Have you taken a career break?
Speaker 1 (37:32):
No, I have not, haven't stopped.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
I think it's high time that you did. But genuinely
think that and for somebody who's an integrator, career break
doesn't need to mean a complete break from everything that
you'd like thinking about. What it does mean is having
something to look forward to that's going to be a
bit of a circuit breaker to your life, and that
(37:58):
is where you can have time away to think of
new book ideas, to think of guests you want to
have on your podcast, to think of all those things
that you get meaning from with your daughter and with
your relationships and with your partner. Prioritizing all of that
within a career break, and a career break is once
again a really personal thing for many people. I recommend
(38:19):
that people take career breaks once every decade and a
half if you can. The idea of just stepping away
from work for a period or from irresponsibilities, and it's
not just a holiday, it's thinking a little bit more
consciously about what you want to get out of it.
I do love that in career breaks, there's actually researchers
have identified three different types of career breaks. There is
(38:41):
a working holiday where you do some work as you
are there, and you generally come back into your same profession.
There's a free dive, which is where you really dive
into something else or something completely different. And there's a quest,
which is where you need to seek out something spiritually
a bit higher, and so thinking throughously before you do
(39:01):
it which type of career break you want is probably
the best way of doing it.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
I'm so inspired to sit down and think about this, Tim.
I feel like I could just keep talking to you
for another eight hours, but then I mean you'd have
to clock off before then anyway. But Tim, thank you
so much. I'm so glad we could organize this conversation
for when you're in Melbourne. It's just been a joy
and very inspiring for me.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
Thank you, Mantha. I've loved it as well.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
I hope you loved this chat with Tim as much
as I did. I left feeling so inspired by what
he's achieved in his own life and left me thinking
a lot about how I could challenge some of the
rules and assumptions that are placed upon work and what
work is meant to look like. I haven't quite reached
any answers for myself yet, but it started a conversation
(39:48):
in my head. And if you want to learn more
about Tim. I highly recommend his book Work Backwards, which
unpacks a lot more concepts about how we can approach
work and life quite differently. If you like today's show,
make sure you hit follow on your podcast app to
be alerted when new episodes drop. How I Work was
(40:09):
recorded on the traditional land of the Warrangery people, part
of the Kola Nation. A big thank you to my
editor Rowena Murray and Martin Nimmer for doing the sound mix.
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