What matters

I earlier talked about priorities.  Here I'll go a little more in depth in one area: work.  Work itself is not the priority, of course, it's what you do outside of work that matters to most people.  Things like food, shelter, clothing, and hopefully something left over to do more with.

The part of work that enables you to do anything else is, quite simply, the pay.  This can be cash, of course, but also includes other benefits (health care coverage, retirement funding, etc.).  There are non-monetary benefits, too, such as flexible work hours, but you pretty much either have them or you don't, and changing that means really one of two things: finding a new job with a different employer that is more flexible, or negotiating with your manager (and, if that fails, resorting to the first option).

So, let's focus on the pay.  What actions can you do to affect your overall remuneration within your current job?  Most obviously, this is simply doing the work required of you, doing it well, contributing to others' workloads (positively), ... well, that's what a lot of people think.  It's not.  It's what most positively affects the guy paying your salary.  And that's not your manager.  Or her manager.  It's the customer.

But, do you really care about the customer? Not really.  You care about your pay.  Let's see if we can follow that back a bit.

The reason I try to write high-quality code and contribute to our documentation and drive for better message quality and and and ... is so that the customer doesn't call me and interrupt my work.  By getting fewer interruptions, I get more work done.  When I get more work done, I get a better year-end review rating.  When I get a better year-end review rating, I get more pay.

I don't care about the customer.  I care about my pay.

And so far, I haven't had a manager complain about this logic.