Don’t lower the standard because the day got harder.

Hard days invite renegotiation, and the renegotiation always sounds compassionate. You are tired, things went badly, surely this once does not count. Sometimes that is genuinely right and rest is the correct answer. But when lowering the bar becomes the automatic response to difficulty, the bar starts moving down at exactly the pace your worst weeks set.

Define a floor in advance, a version so small that a bad day cannot honestly excuse it. Ten minutes, one page, one call. Then let the hard days be handled by the floor rather than by a new negotiation each time.