High Performers Do Less

“High performance” has become a phrase that hides a lot of meanings. In one, useful sense it means making the most of your abilities to produce useful value for others. In a less useful, more LinkedIn-y sense, it’s often just a mask for impossible standards that collapses into some vague story about always working harder, sleeping less, moving faster, squeezing more from every waking hour… it’s a clever narrative, but that’s all. It’s some kind of strange, modern religion that promises salvation, meaning and purpose to be found through (by hilarious coincidence) just exactly whatever the billionaires want you to do!

High performance, at least in any sustainable and meaningful sense, is not about intensity, or grinding, or minimising sleep. It is not about looksmaxxing, peptides, or crafting the perfect “second brain” with Claude and Obsidian.

It is just two things: consistency and ruthless prioritisation.

It’s simple, sure, but simple and easy are very different things - software engineers should know this better than most! These two things will allow you to maximise your impact across life and work if (being the key word) that is your goal. You are under no obligation to maximise or optimise anything. It’s your life, don’t let the productivity cult (or me) tell you what’s right for you.

Consistency Is Rhythm

You do not brush your teeth for two hours once a month - you brush them for a few minutes every day - this is what amounts to good oral hygiene. The result comes from rhythm. Rhythm turns into momentum, and momentum turns back into rhythm.

This consistency is what brings about excellent teeth, and it’s what brings about excellent humans.

Work, fitness, relationships, leadership, engineering - all of these are less about dramatic bursts and more about sustained cadence. A little, done well and repeatedly, is more powerful than rare episodes of extreme effort followed by collapse.

Many ambitious people often dislike this because it lacks a certain romance. There is nothing particularly cinematic about sleeping properly, showing up every day, making incremental progress, and repeating the process for years. It does not feel legendary. It feels ordinary. That’s why so many find themselves watching YouTube video after video about “how to get strong” yet never set foot in a gym. They’re looking for the sexy answer. The real answer is just lift heavy things, safely and repeatedly, for a long time. Simple, sure, but simple and easy are very different things.

You Are A Pyramid

One of the stranger habits in modern professional culture is pretending the body is somehow separate from performance, as though your mind exists in a magical vacuum and your body is this fleshy necessity that you need to feed and water just enough so that it doesn’t keel over. This is like pretending the speed of a car (its performance) can somehow be considered separate from its moving parts.

If you are chronically underslept, dehydrated, sedentary, overstimulated, under-recovered, and nutritionally chaotic, then trying to perform at a consistently high level becomes dramatically harder than it needs to be. You don’t have to optimise these things, but without a solid base your pyramid is going to struggle as soon as a storm comes - and there’s always a storm coming.

Sleep is the obvious one, and yet probably the most ignored. Sleep deprivation is often treated like evidence of commitment, you hear it in offices all the time - people weirdly, subtly bragging about how tired they are all the time… It’s a very strange feature of our work culture, considering we now know driving tired can be as bad or even worse than drink driving. Who would come to work bragging that they were really drunk?

Abundance of delicious coffee becomes a substitute for water, compounding with lack of sleep when the caffeine wears off and your body has no water left. Do you tend to crash or get sleepy after lunch? You’re probably drinking too much coffee and not enough water. There is a meaningful difference between enjoying a morning coffee and repeatedly whipping a tired, dehydrated nervous system in order to ignore its desperate pleas for rest.

Exercise matters for similar reasons. This does not require ideological devotion to some hyper-optimised protocol, just walk outside. Lift something heavy occasionally. Stretch. Move your body enough that your physical systems remain functional. Think back to the car analogy - you don’t let a car sit for too long without driving it or else the battery runs out, oil begins to congeal, etc.

Diet is much the same. Ignore fads - variety and moderation is usually all that’s needed. This is hard to achieve if you don’t take appropriate breaks, you end up scoffing whatever’s available when you suddenly realise you’re starving because you skipped breakfast and lunch.

And then there is everything beyond work: family, leisure, spirituality, community, meaning - whatever reminds you that your professional output is not the sole pillar of your existence.

This part matters because many ambitious people accidentally construct their lives upside down: they build identity around work first, then attempt to balance health, relationships, and purpose precariously on top of it. That’s not how you build a pyramid.

Maslow would advise against that. As would Newton.

Ruthless Prioritisation

If consistency is about sustainable motion, ruthless prioritisation is about direction. This is where things become psychologically difficult, because prioritisation is not really about deciding what matters, the real challenge is deciding what does not matter right now, and then having the discipline to ignore it.

Only one thing can meaningfully be the highest priority in a given moment. That priority may change throughout the day. For example before work, perhaps the highest priority is your morning walk, your children, your partner, your coffee, your prayer, your sketchbook, your dog - whatever genuinely deserves your full presence in that moment. Ruthlessly prioritise it.

Turn off your phone. Turn off Slack. Choose the one thing that matters, and make the (sometimes hard) decision that other things don’t matter (right now).

When work begins, the same principle applies - do the thing that actually matters now, and intentionally ignore the rest. Not the speculative refactor that may matter in six months. Not the elegant architecture that has not yet earned its cost. Not the hypothetical stakeholder request we imagine coming next. Not every possible future problem simultaneously. Just one thing that matters right now. This is especially relevant for engineers, because engineering minds are often very vulnerable to “productive procrastination” - the seductive habit of tidying your workspace instead of doing work.

If you have ever worked on software optimisation, you already understand this intuitively: you cannot make a CPU faster by demanding more from it; you can only improve performance by reducing unnecessary work. That is ruthless prioritisation.

High performance is often not about doing more, it’s about doing less things that don’t matter.

False Responsibility

One of the hardest parts of ruthless prioritisation is that you are rarely thinking of a potential distraction as a distraction, you are often thinking of it as a responsibility. If you are a conscientious, capable person, your brain will constantly be tricking you into taking on work that isn’t yours.

Your brain will happily produce an endless stream of plausible concerns:

• What about next quarter?
• What if stakeholders change direction?
• What if this architecture becomes limiting?
• What if I should just quickly investigate…

Sometimes those concerns are valid - but more often than not, they are anxiety disguised as diligence. Often, you are taking on the work of somebody else - your boss, your team mate, your own future self.

The discipline of high performance is not the absence of foresight. It is knowing when foresight is genuinely grounded in present reality and matters right now, and when it is merely trading tomorrow for today.

This is difficult because intelligence itself can become a liability here - the more capable you are, the better you are likely to be at inventing future problems, almost none of which will ever materialise.

High performance certainly includes thinking ahead - but it distinguishes clearly between today’s and tomorrow’s problems, and prioritises accordingly.

High Performance Is Sustainable Precision

Many people, particularly younger people, are sucked into a mythic representation of performance - one that often results in them becoming more performative, rather than more performant.

The key principles to keep in mind are:

• Consistency beats intensity. Keep a consistent rhythm to your work that balances your needs. Look out for the 20 Mile March or The Hare & The Tortoise.
• Subtraction beats addition. Ruthless prioritisation is how you achieve more - never half ass two things; whole ass one thing. Ask what can be removed.

High performance, in real life, is not about mythical superhuman ability, it’s about building a sustainable system that lets you repeatedly do work that actually matters - and cut anything that doesn’t.

Consistency gives you motion. Ruthless prioritisation gives you direction.

Your energy, ability and time are your most precious resources, and they are limited. Cultivate them with self care, and then spend them with intention.