The subconscious - the part of you that runs the show - is childlike. To drive your life forward, it needs meaningful, sensory, exciting images. Make a few minutes, not just today but often - perhaps on the commute or instead of channel hopping - to let your imagination run away with you. Imagine what it would be like to live a carefree, happy and successful life. Imagine what it would look, feel and sound like. Even imagine what you'd taste and smell. Let your imagination take you to where you really want to go.

I read this morning that France has embarked on a clean out of its outrageously complicated rules for... well, everything. It's following in the UK and Germany's footsteps who, through simplifying their regulations have saved their economies billions of euros in recent years.

But why would any sane person - or group of people - allow costs to be heaped on ordinary people through ridiculous regulation in the first place?

What are we talking about? Well, French rules stipulate things like: a lunchtime sausage in a school cafeteria must weigh 20gms - exactly. If its weighs more or less... throw it away! A French wages slip barely fits on an A4 page, with up to forty individual items - sadly, they almost all relate to deductions! A referee's changing room - even in the local football club down the road - must measure six square metres: more or less... knock it down and rebuild it. Or, the most amusing one from this morning's news, bakers must, by law, inform the local police of their holiday plans.

There's no point in trying to explain any of these rules - they're simply examples of just how crazy we all are.

I recently finished up a one-day client workshop by drawing the group's attention to the fact that, as we closed our day together, we were nearly nine hours closer to our death than we were when we started that morning. "Well, you're a treat" may have been the initial response but, when you think about it, the fact that our time is limited should be a wake-up call for all of us.

There's an old saying theat "hanging concentrates the mind". Again, Steve Jobs, in his famous Stanford Commencement Address, pointed out that, when you realize that you're going to die, all fear vanishes, you've nothing to lose... the idea of mortality is somehow liberating.

I've often wondered at the Buddhist practice known as "Meditation on Passing a Cemetery" - how you're advised to visualize the flesh of each corpse rotting and being consumed by bacteria and various forms of wildlife. I've often marvelled at the grotesque and, on first glance, highly negative nature of the exercise. But there is much more to it than what appears at face value.

You and I know that we are going to die. But we don't realize it. It means nothing to us. If it did, we wouldn't piddle away our hours, days, months and years on the superfluous and the wasteful: in the couple of minutes it will take you to read and think about replying to the next CCed email you receive today you will have lost precious, never to be repeated, time; with your thumb on the TV's channel changer, you are zapping away precious moments of your life; as you revel in the nasty gossip of others' difficulties, your pouring precious minutes down the toilet; as you take comfort in performing tasks that add nothing to your quality of work or life, you are, in fact, adding to your discomfort.

Wake up, you're on borrowed time. Every moment count. Don't even begin to count or evaluate all the time that you've lost - that would be a further waste of precious time. Take a few deep breaths, come into the here and now. Armed with that presence of mind, decide what you should be doing now, what you need to do now to advance your cause... to get you to where you want to go. Take another deep breath and another, feel what it's like to truly be alive. Wake up and smell the roses... before too long they'll be thrown atop the wooden box that will carry your mortal remains.