Prefer a Long-Term Philosophy. One way to make long-term progress is to burn the candle at a sustainable rate. Small but Consistent beats Big but Sporadic.
Place a premium on maintaining your ability to recover fully in between working days. This means stopping with some in the tank, even on days where progress is coming easy and you’d rather stay up late riding the wave. This will leave you more tired tomorrow, less likely to make progress then. It will also set your expectations (even subconsciously) that “just getting started” has a higher bar, because it might result in one of those wear-yourself-out-type efforts.
Setting an upper-bound on your production for a given period (e.g. I’ll make no more than 10 slides today) is a way to ensure you’re using slow burns rather than heavy lifts.
You can actually bound both directions - today I will do at least X, but no more than Y.
Somewhere I recall seeing advice re: starting a journaling habit that said “write less than you want to”.