Your standards don’t really exist until you’re tired enough to lower them and don’t.

Anything is easy to maintain when maintaining it costs nothing. The test arrives at the end of a long day, when the reasonable-sounding case for skipping is fully assembled and nobody would blame you. What you do at that moment is the actual standard, and everything before it was intention with favorable conditions.

Decide in advance what the tired version looks like so you are not negotiating at midnight. A reduced but real effort, done badly, still counts. The point is that the line holds even when the quality dips.