Do the job like God’s your manager, because He is.

Most of what you do is unsupervised. Quality rises and falls with whether anyone is looking, which is how the boring parts get half done and nobody ever finds out. Working as though the standard does not depend on an audience takes the humiliation out of small jobs. It also removes the excuse.

Find the part of your work that nobody checks and do it properly once this week. The corner you usually skip, the cleanup, the follow-up message. Notice what it does to your opinion of yourself, which turns out to be the wage that small unwatched jobs actually pay.