Good cooks taste the sauce ten times before it’s done. Check your work while you can still change it.

Checking at the end tells you how it went. Checking in the middle lets you do something about it. A cook tasting as they go is gathering information while adjustment is still cheap, which is the opposite of handing in an essay and finding out a week later that the second half drifted.

Build one checkpoint into whatever you are working on before the deadline. Read the essay out loud two days early, or show the first half to someone. On a shift, ask early whether you are doing it the way they want rather than at the end.