Most operators track revenue, pipeline, churn, and output. Almost nobody tracks the variable that quietly controls all of them: how long a bad day steals your ability to execute.

In engineering, teams track MTTR (mean time to repair/recover): the average time it takes to restore a system after failure. Your personal version is the same idea: Recovery Velocity.

Not “motivation.” Not “stamina.” Just: How fast do you return to baseline execution after you get hit?

A deal dies. A client goes cold. A bug ships. A key person drops a curveball.

The event is real, but the real cost is what happens next: your mind keeps running the incident long after the incident is over.

Research on perseverative cognition (worry/rumination) shows it can prolong stress-related physiological activation beyond the stressor itself.

Translation: the problem ends, but your body and attention can stay “on alert,” which makes decisions worse and action harder.

So the competitive edge isn’t “never have bad days.” It’s shortening your time-to-restore.

Work-recovery research has grown because recovery isn’t fluffy—it’s a performance input. A major review in Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior summarizes that unwinding and recovering from work is important for sustaining well-being, motivation, and job performance.

High performers don’t avoid volatility. They manage it.
Think in signal terms:

Winners don’t always have lower amplitude. They almost always have shorter duration.

This is not self-care. This is incident response for your brain.

Your brain attaches state to place. Don’t “process the failure” in the same environment where you’re supposed to build.

Do this for 5 minutes:

You’re not pretending nothing happened. You’re telling your nervous system: we’re restoring operations.

Bad days feel heavy because every open loop screams “urgent.”

Write three buckets:

Then pick one “must act” and define a next action so small you can’t negotiate with it:

Your goal is not solving the whole problem. Your goal is creating forward motion.

Progress is a psychological reset button.

Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer’s “Progress Principle” argues that small wins/progress in meaningful work is a major driver of inner work life (the emotions and perceptions that influence performance).

Use a 20-minute “two-win restart”:

Bad days thrive on ambiguity. Micro-wins replace ambiguity with proof.

If your body is still keyed up, your brain will keep generating threat stories.

A randomized study in Cell Reports Medicine found that brief daily breathwork—especially exhale-focused cyclic sighing—produced greater improvements in mood (and reductions in respiratory rate) compared with mindfulness meditation in their sample.

Try this rapid reset:

This doesn’t solve the business problem. It restores your ability to solve it.

You’re going to measure one thing: RTB (Recovery Time To Baseline): the time between the impact moment and your first meaningful forward action.

IBaseline doesn’t mean “I feel amazing.” Baseline means: I can make clear decisions and execute the next step. How to track in 15 seconds: Note the time when the hit happens → Note the time when you complete your first meaningful action (sent the email, made the call, shipped the fix) → RTB = end − start

Do it for 14 days. Then look at your median RTB. Your goal is simple: bring the median down.

Don’t moralize. Diagnose.

Your edge isn’t endless discipline. It’s fast restoration.

Track RTB like you track cash. Install a Recovery Stack like you install analytics. Because over a year, the winner isn’t the person who never gets knocked off course. It’s the person who gets knocked off, and comes back online faster.