Before we touch a single thought or feeling, we're going to look at a graph. It tracks where your hours actually go, and almost nobody has ever looked at theirs.
Picture a graph with effort along the bottom and quality up the side. The first hour of work moves quality enormously: a draft exists where nothing existed. The second hour still buys a lot. Somewhere around good, though, the curve bends, and past the bend each additional hour buys less than the one before it.
That flat stretch is where polish lives. The fourth read-through, the reformatted slides, the paragraph rewritten to say what it already said in a slightly different order. If you added up an ordinary week, you might find the last ten percent of quality eating something like half the total hours, which is a lot to pay for work that was already good.
There's a second fact about the flat part, less comfortable than the first: you are usually the only person who can see it. The difference between your 90% and your 98% is vivid to you at 11pm, while you're paying for it, and invisible to your manager, your client, and honestly, by Thursday, to you. Those hours buy something with an audience of one, and the audience doesn't keep the receipt.
None of this is an argument for caring less. Some work genuinely deserves the far end of the curve, and week three is partly about choosing which work that is and protecting it on purpose. The problem is a contract that quietly sets every task to maximum polish, as if status emails and wedding toasts and expense reports all sat on the same curve.
No behavior changes yet. Just run each evening's work through one question: where did the curve bend today, and how long did I stay out past it? Your evening check-in is collecting exactly that (polish minutes past the bar), so by the weekly review you'll have your own curve, in your own numbers.
One warning about that number. Most people's first reaction to it isn't guilt but something closer to sadness about all those evenings, and that's a reasonable response to an honest ledger. The hours do come back. Getting them back is what the rest of the program is for.