I don't think the feeling of anxiety ever completely goes away; we're even limited, apparently, in our capacity to embrace our limitations. But I'm a… - Oliver Burkeman

As the American author Jay Jennifer Matthews puts it in her excellently titled short book Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are, 'We cannot get anything out of life.14 There is no outside where we could take this thing to. There is no little pocket, situated outside of life, [to which we could] steal life's provisions and squirrel them away. The life of this moment has no outside.' Living more fully in the present may be simply a matter of finally realising that you never had any other option but to be here now. 9.

Without noticing we're doing it, we treat the future as intrinsically more valuable than the present. And yet the future never seems to arrive.

keep two to-do lists, one "open" and one "closed." The open list is for everything that's on your plate and will doubtless be nightmarishly long. Fortunately, it's not your job to tackle it: instead, feed tasks from the open list to the closed one — that is, a list with a fixed number of entries, ten at most. The rule is that you can't add a new task until one's completed. (You may also require a third list, for tasks that are "on hold" until someone else gets back to you.)