Around last week, the thought of exams popped into my mind.

Not that I was preparing for one, but the general essence of it. You're allotted a fixed time and must do your best work during that time.

Once that time's up, you put your pen down, submit your paper and make peace with being evaluated on whatever you've managed to write in the time. No extensions.

This method has two benefits:

First, it primes our minds for intense focus.

Whether we move up a class in school or fail the test and repeat the subjects depended on how well we did in these 2–3 hours. Therefore, regardless of the number of distractions around us, we learned to focus on the task at hand, which was writing the paper.

Secondly, exams taught us not to dwell on being perfect.

With limited time, we had to manage our time efficiently and not spend so much on a single question that we missed the twenty others. We learned to be okay with a good enough answer and move on.

These are all crucial elements of working on a task that we can apply in our daily work — especially now.

With hundreds of distractions around us and the comfort of hiding behind the mask of perfection, many of us often struggle to finish anything on time.

I've spent hours writing and polishing articles that I estimated to be a 2–3 hour job because I wasted time checking my phone for the 10th time or worrying that what I'm writing is not good enough.

While maintaining a quality standard in our work is crucial to stand out in an ocean of botched jobs, aiming to be 85% there and imposing strict deadlines can help curb procrastination and perfectionism.

After this epiphany, I've been experimenting with setting timers with live countdowns to recreate that examination mood while working, and it has been going well so far.

I'll report further on how this pans out over an extended period in the coming weeks.

For now, feel free to try this approach if you're struggling to manage distractions and complete your tasks on time. It might help you, too.

In other news, I've managed to create a macOS shortcut that lets me clip highlights from webpages opened in Safari into a note in Apple Notes.

The shortcut checks for any existing notes in my workspace for the website I'm clipping from and adds new highlights to the note if one's already there. Otherwise, it will create a new note with the article title and link.

This is what a note with highlights looks like:

All highlights from an article are tucked into a single note for later reference.

The shortcut works while browsing webpages on Safari in macOS and can be conveniently triggered by selecting a passage and pressing a keyboard shortcut.

If you're a Hulry Plus member, you can find a link to this shortcut in the #shortcuts channel of the member-only Discord community.

Now, before you move on to the rest of this newsletter issue, here are a few words from: