3. Get in early and go home on time.

Too many people get to work fifteen minutes late, thinking they’ll stay late to make up the lost time. They spend the first half hour getting coffee and catching up with colleagues on the hot new reality TV show. Once they sit down, they make a couple of personal phone calls, and if they’re lucky, they’ll get in an hour or so of “real work” before lunch. Of course, lunch itself is split between planning an upcoming meeting at their desks and catching up on office gossip. With the rest of the day spent returning emails, they might get in two or three hours of real work. So they stay late, inevitably chatting with the other night owls for another half an hour. But it’s okay—after all, they’re “off the clock.” These people leave the office hours later than they should. They feel burned out because they’ve been there for almost ten hours, crammed in lunch at their desks, and still have so much left to do. Such people often feel ill–used by the organization and see themselves as martyrs. But the truth is, they have wasted hours of valuable work time and have accomplished far less than they could have.

Naturally, it’s great to cultivate relationships with your peers (the people who work regularly with you), but no matter the culture of the organization, it’s worth your time to get to know a few other people as well, as they can help you out greatly without much effort on their part.

Here are ten people you should get to know in your organization as soon as possible to make your job go smoother and also maximize your promotion opportunities later.

• The boss
• The boss’s boss
• The janitor
• The secretary
• The boss’s secretary
• The boss’s boss’s secretary
• The person with the most seniority close to you in job rank
• The human resources person assigned to you
• The IT specialist assigned to you
• The person with the most job knowledge close to you in job rank