Your first month at a new job, you’ll feel slow. Everyone does. The good ones keep asking questions.

Being slow at the start is a function of not knowing where things are, and it ends on its own as that knowledge arrives. What varies between people is not the speed, it is whether they keep asking after the first week, once asking has begun to feel like admitting something. Questions are the fastest route through, and most people quietly stop using it.

Set yourself a small quota: one question per shift for the first month, even when you could probably guess. Write the answers in your phone so you only ask each one once. And say plainly when you do not know something.