In this post, I’ll show you 3 simple steps you can do so you can improve your performance at work. Bear in mind that improving your performance at work probably won’t directly get you a raise.

Instead, improving your skills and doing more “stuff” for your work allows you to build more points on your resume so you can talk about it for your next interview.

In other words, you should view everything you do and learn at your work as “interview prep” for your next job, which will net you more money.

Switching jobs every couple years is the best way to give yourself a raise without depending on your company’s internal and dysfunctional politics.

The other added benefit in improving your effectiveness at work is simple: you’ll work less.

So without further ado, here’s my 3-step framework on how to do excellent work.

Step 1 To Improve Your Performance At Work: Eliminate Distractions

Focus is the most important thing if you’d like to improve your work performance anywhere.

Most managers want you to waste a ton of time being nice to people, while wanting you to produce enormous amounts of work. You can only pick one, so you should opt for the latter.

Schmoozing at work isn’t a good way to get a raise, because you can’t put it on your resume and use it for your next interview. Learning new stuff and attacking new problems lets you talk about it in your next interview. Hence, between the choice of: 1) politics, or 2) work/focus, you should pick 2) as it will give you more money.

When you eliminate distractions so you can focus, you can end up with 10-hour workweeks that are more productive than your coworkers’ 40 hour weeks.

Some notes to keep in mind as you’re following the 10-hour workweek model:

• It’s OK to be the bad guy. Most large corporations won’t fire you if you produce results, even if you’re slower to respond to emails.
• Personally, I take it too far and I flat out ignore people for days if I’m trying to focus. A World Without Email by Cal Newport teaches you how to eliminate distractions and focus in a much more graceful way.
• Other books that come to mind that teaches you how to handle distracting coworkers are: 1) The 4-Hour Workweek, and 2) Deep Work.
• I highly recommend giving these books a read as they’ve created huge perspective shifts for me on how I engage work.

Once you’ve “freed up” a bunch of time so you can focus 100% on tasks at hand, it’s time for step 2.

Step 2: Figure It Out Yourself And Break Down Your Problems Into Smaller Problems

You should learn the skill of figuring out shit for yourself.

Either Google it or come up with a hypothesis and test some ideas.

Only when you’ve tried a few things and it doesn’t work should you seek help. And by seeking help, I mean “put it in a list of questions to ask.”

To reiterate, you should:

1. Make an honest attempt to figure shit out. And if you still can’t figure it out,
2. Put it in a list of questions to ask. Once your list of questions hit a threshold, send an email with a list of detailed questions. This will eliminate back-and-forth emails, calls, and meetings.

Most of your coworkers will do the exact opposite. They’ll:

1. Ask for help the minute they don’t know something, without attempting to use a single brain cell.
2. Waste a lot of time because instead of sending an email with a batch of questions, they send 18 emails for 6 questions.

If you want to work less, it might seem counterintuitive to try so hard. But actually, you’ll work much less if you figure out stuff by yourself. The reason’s because the more stuff you figure out by yourself, the more skilled you’ll be at your job. The more skilled you are, the less time it’ll take you to do tasks in the future.

Compare this “upfront time investment” strategy to your coworkers who need to ask questions every time they don’t know something. They’ll get an answer and won’t ever be capable of critical thought. This means going forward, your coworkers are forevermore stuck in a loop of asking simple questions and will take much longer to do basic tasks (since they won’t ever learn when they just copy/paste the answers from the answer section of the textbook).

So please, figure shit out yourself.

The second part of this is of course: how do you figure shit out for yourself?

Obviously, if you can figure out hard things you automatically improve your work performance, period.

The best high-level advice I can give you is: break down large problems into small problems.

As an example:

• I’m in hardware engineering and I get a lot of requests to build these complicated systems.
• But building these super complex systems is actually quite easy…if you break them down into much smaller problems.
• I’m a visual learner so I’d sketch out the big problem and break big, rough sketch down into a bunch of smaller sketches. Once I have smaller sketches, I brainstorm on how to actually code each of the smaller sketches up.
• Details matter a lot here, especially once you’ve broken down the big problem into smaller problems. Solving each of the smaller problems should be somewhat intellectually challenging and difficult. As such, this requires focus and isn’t something you can just do with random distractions.
• This is why you must complete “step 1” of this framework before step 2. None of this problem-solving stuff works if you’re still distracted by coworkers.
• It’s worth hammering out all these small details, because you’ll find that your solution will be pretty close to perfect after you’re done.
• As an example, I was told to overhaul a large piece of code, requiring 3000+ lines of change and a large architectural change in the code.
• I broke the big problem down into small chunks and it required a fair amount of intense thinking. About a week.
• I implemented each of the smaller problems methodically while thinking through all the corner cases that could happen. This took another week.
• After 3k lines of complicated code, there’s only ~5 bugs related to it throughout the project. As a comparison: Others would write 200 simple lines of code and have 20 bugs to solve.

In other words, investing a ton of focus, intellectual energy, and time upfront will save you time over the long term. It might take you 20-30 hours to solve a very difficult problem and you’ll piss people off by not responding to them.

But would you rather have: a) Much less work for the next 6 months with slightly angry co-workers, or b) be cleaning up after your own mess for the next 6 months + set the expectation that you need to respond to messages/emails every few minutes?

Step 3: Document Your Problem-Solving Process, And Make It Marketable

It’s great you want to improve your work performance. But it’ll be even greater when you can show off what you did at your next interview.

• Document the problem however you’d like. You can go as high or as low-level as you want. Just make your story relevant in an interview setting.
• The point is you want to craft your accomplishments here as a ‘pitch’ or a ‘story’ to present at your next interview (because as we know, getting a new job = huge pay jumps).

After all, why spend all this effort and solving hard problems for a company that’s clearly exploiting you without some compensation?

You’ve already done all the hard work. Just make it into a good story to tell at your next interview. Please!

Keep track of your accomplishments on a Google Doc and then print out your accomplishments/their stories as talking points at your next interview!

As Long As You’re Distracted, Your Work Performance Won’t Improve

Distraction is a dangerous thing.

None of this works if you’re distracted.

Think about one of the hardest things you’ve ever done, intellectually. Whether it’s a school project or something work-related.

Now think about how much harder that task would be if you had to pause every 5 minutes answering some stupid question from one of your stupid coworkers.

It’s impossible, and will take a lot more of your time. In sum:

• Being distracted at work = you’ll spend 10X more time at work, for no reason. You won’t improve your work performance, and you’ll be more stressed out as a result.
• Being extremely focused = minimize your time at work in the long run, and will allow you to coherently construct a narrative based on your accomplishments for your next interview.
  • In addition, solving a very hard problem distracted will make it a lot harder to present your accomplishments at your next interview. Reason’s because it’ll much longer to complete the task. And when it takes a ton more time for you to do your task, your mental model of the problem will be quite scattered and it’ll be like someone with amnesia trying to piece together what happened. You can certainly do it, but why would you? Just stop being distracted and focus.

To keep it super simple for you: distracted = more stress and less money. Focused = less stress and more money.

Use the 3-step framework above to get focused, solve problems, and leverage yourself to be more marketable to get a ton more money.