In an age of attention scarcity, the greatest act of good citizenship may be learning to withdraw your attention from everything except the battles y… - Oliver Burkeman

Beyond the mountains, there are always more mountains, at least until you reach the final mountain before your time on earth comes to an end. In the meantime, few things are more exhilarating than mountaineering.

The argument goes as follows: that no matter where you draw the boundary – even if we could agree on a place at which to draw it – you would not really be drawing a boundary in the conventional sense at all. Because (here it comes) the very notion of a boundary line depends on it having two sides.

Whenever a generous impulse arises in your mind – to give money, check in on a friend, send an email praising someone's work – act on the impulse right away, rather than putting it off until later.

When we fail to act on such urges, it's rarely out of mean-spiritedness, or because we have second thoughts about whether the prospective recipient deserves it. More often, it's because of some attitude stemming from our efforts to feel in control of our time. We tell ourselves we'll turn to it when our urgent work is out of the way, or when we have enough spare time to do it really well; or that we ought first to spend a bit longer researching the best recipients for our charitable donations before making any, et cetera.

But the only donations that count are the ones you actually get around to making. And while your colleague might appreciate a nicely worded message of praise more than a hastily worded one, the latter is vastly preferable to what's truly most likely to happen if you put it off, which is that you'll never get around to sending that message.