It’s been a week full of raucous excitement and non-stop activity; from securing two major new clients and 2 days gigging with my best band buddies, to planning an Easter surprise and a trans-Atlantic summer trip, it seems as if every available minute has been fully spent.

In fact, the last 7 days reminded me of a parable told to me by one of my earliest mentors, a wise old sage charged with coaching me and 20 other eager students in the principles of business, back in the late…well, quite some time ago anyway!

He asked us to imagine having a bank account with £86,400 in it. The catch is: every night, the bank claims back whatever part of the balance you didn’t spend during the day.

Next morning though, there’s another £86,400 sitting in your account, ready to use.

Is there anybody who wouldn’t soon learn to draw out every penny, every day?

Well, we all have an account like that; it’s called TIME! Every day you have 86,400 seconds available to spend. Each evening, when the bank cancels every second you didn’t use, it’s lost forever. The loss is yours. There is no going back, and there is no dipping into tomorrow’s.

In case you don’t fully appreciate the value of time, think about this: if you’re 30 today, you’ve probably got about another 1,300 million of these little credits left, in total. That’s not so many, when you’re spending more than 31 million a year!

Ask a student who failed his finals how much a year is worth; the mother of a premature baby the value of a month, or the editor of a weekly newspaper how much he values 7 whole days!

If you think a minute is pretty worthless, try getting to the station sixty seconds after the train left, or ask a motorist who just near-missed a head-on collision what value he would now place on that last second.

So, like I did last week, you should treasure every moment of this precious, irreplaceable life and fill it with fun, fulfilment and your favourite people.