My parents passed away a few years ago. Only after their death did I start to notice that the way they acted day to day overlaps in many places with the productivity and time management advice I keep finding in books, blog posts and YouTube videos.
Nobody explained it to them using terms from self-help guides. They simply lived that way, and I had it in front of my eyes from an early age. In this post I will describe four such habits: one from my mom and three from my dad.
Take notes, collect and organize
My mom always had folders full of documents and notebooks where she wrote things down. When I still lived with my parents, all these “papers” looked to me like a pile of useless stuff. She worked as an accountant, so I told myself that this was how they had taught her at school and at work, and that she was carrying the same habits over into home life.
When I go through productivity material today, I often come across the idea of a “second brain”, a way of writing down important information in text form. If you type that phrase into a search engine, you will find plenty of posts, videos and books.
What my mom did is exactly what is now called a “second brain”: she collected contracts, receipts, notes from important events, contact details and birthdays of family and friends. She even kept newspaper clippings, the equivalent of today’s screenshots of web pages. There were many more types of content like that.
I built my first “second brain” at university. I had a very tight monthly budget and I wrote down every expense so I knew where the money went and could forecast how much would be left until the end of the month. It was a copy of what my mom did. She kept a list of fixed household expenses (rent, electricity, phone), recorded their history and made a forecast for the coming months.
The second knowledge base I kept regularly was my gym training. Recently, while cleaning up, I threw away a few notebooks in which I recorded my workouts and planned the next ones.
Today I take notes digitally. I also scan paper documents into digital form, such as contracts. I had the pattern of collecting and organizing information in front of me since childhood. In recent years I have only been refining it.
Get up early and do the most important thing
Whenever my dad had something bigger to do on his days off, he always started early in the morning. The bigger shopping before holidays or the weekend was done and brought home while I was only just getting out of bed.
He started work at my grandmother’s place in the countryside as early as possible, usually before seven in the morning, and sometimes earlier (we lived in the city, but my grandmother in the countryside had some farmland, a large plot around the house and a house that needed regular repairs). His approach was that he would not eat lunch, and sometimes would not eat anything, until he had finished the task.
You will find this pattern today in a lot of productivity advice, among others:
- the idea of not eating in the morning so you do not waste energy on digestion and can put it into the task instead,
- the idea of getting up early, while others are still asleep, because it is easier to get things done, even shopping,
- the idea of a few wins a day (most often shown as “3 wins”), which says to start the day with the most important tasks and finish them as quickly as possible, so the rest of the day is easier.
It also overlaps with the approach to diet and the idea of intermittent fasting, that is, eating within set hours, for example from 12:00 to 20:00.
All of this together is what you can see today under the label “5 am club” and similar ones. I had this pattern in front of me from an early age too.
You do not have to be ready, just take the first step
My dad could solve all kinds of unusual problems. It was mostly about physical problems: how to fix something, how to improve something (professionally he was a mechanic for the state railways). I was so used to it that long after his death, whenever I had a problem, my first instinct was to call him and ask how to solve it. Other people from the family and from his circle felt the same way.
Often he did not fully know how to solve a given problem, but he took it on without hesitation. He knew what result he had to achieve, and he acted so as to get there.
He showed the same pattern to us, my brother and me, when he took us on train trips. We had discounts on PKP tickets (at one point even 100%), so we could see a bit of the country by traveling by rail (we did not have a car). I remember that we usually only knew which train we would start the trip on, where we would get off at the first station and that we would return home at the end of the day. We planned the next legs only on the spot, after finishing the previous one, or during the ride, based on the pocket train timetable that my dad often carried with him (and which, honestly, I liked to study).
This is exactly what advice like “you do not have to be fully ready to start” is about. If you do not know how to reach the goal, take the first step, and only then think about the next one.
The best example of acting this way is my move to university. In 2003 I got into university in Wroclaw, which was about ten hours away by train from my hometown. At the end of September, one night, I boarded a train without having either an apartment or a place in a dormitory in Wroclaw.
I only had a goal and the first step: to arrive in Wroclaw in the morning, leave my backpack with distant relatives, buy a newspaper with rental listings for a room or an apartment, and then call, travel around, view places and rent something. I did not have a mobile phone back then, so the rest was supposed to fall into place once I was there.
When I arrived, at around nine in the morning I called my parents from a phone booth at the station. It turned out that the postman had come that morning with a letter regarding my appeal against being denied a place in the dormitory. They had granted me the dormitory after all. So at the last moment I had a roof over my head, and from the PKP station I went straight to the dormitory.
I have the impression that this way of acting, when you set off with a single step and a goal and figure out the rest along the way, more often brings a bit of luck too. If I had waited until everything was settled, I probably would not have boarded that train back then.
Keep track of what is happening in the world
Every day my dad brought home three newspapers: a regional one, a national one and a sports one. Because of that, whether I wanted to or not, I read them too. He also watched teletext and knew a great deal about what was going on in the world.
That stayed with me as well. To this day I try to keep track of what is happening: in my country, in my industry and in the world. Today I read, of course, about AI and the news around it, about Drupal and open source, but also about geopolitics and economics. It is not about following every sensation, but about understanding the context.
This knowledge helps to make better decisions, and not only at work. It also comes in handy in private investments, where understanding what is happening in the economy and on the markets can really matter. I had the habit of reading regularly and observing the world in front of me since childhood, just like the others.
Thank you for everything
The four habits I have described are simple: take notes and organize information, start the day with the most important thing, take the first step even when you do not have a full plan, and keep track of what is happening in the world. I did not find them in a productivity book. I had them at home from childhood, and only years later did I name them the way they are named today. Mom, Dad, thank you for everything.
