The Cunning Code

I was just speaking to an American friend about bugs we’re both dealing with today and he said, in reference for his set.

"Driving me bonkers"

I don’t know about you but I haven’t heard an American use that phrase for a while if ever (if my dear American brethren utter this on a daily basis, I apologies… you need to do it more in front of me) so it jumped out of the conversation at me. It made me smile without losing the meaning of what he was saying.

Do you moderate your more colourful language depending on who you are talking to? And I am not talking about swearing, that’s a matter for another post.

Does the odd ‘quirky’ word help drive your message home? Will it make you memorable?

If you’re pitching something or someone then anything you can do that will differentiate you from the crowd is a good thing, naturally you must let your content / produce speak for itself but you know that once you’ve all gone home the panel will be discussing you and your fellow competitors - do you want to be "the dull one", "the one with the yellow shirt" or "the bouncy one"?

Don’t go over the top, but never moderate your natural speech patterns so much you lose all emotion and pigeon hole yourself as "the flat one" because who wants to employ them or buy from them?

The internet is a steaming quagmire of data. If you want to know something, it’s a fair bet the internet knows the answer.

But what about the information you don’t know you need to know? Or the information you would like to know but you’ve got too much to do right now to look for it?

Using the internet you can let information come to your inbox in neat little packages ready for you to digest as and when you have a few seconds.

You may need to invest a little time to set these up but it’s worth it.

Lets take my life as an example. I spend my weekends in London with my beloved, we both work during the week so at weekends we like to relax and have fun, but due to the aforementioned working we don’t usually have time to plan what to do. This used to result in ‘What shall we do today?’ conversations and wasted time.

I now subscribe to some London related newsletters -

• Daily Candy London (they also do newsletters for )
• Visit London’s newsletter - which not only contains details about upcoming festivals and London events but often special offers
• The Ambassadors group - these people run a number of theatres in London, one of my interests is the theatre so this is perfect for me, knowing what’s coming soon, what offers there are and so on

Between those newsletters, if something interesting is going to be happening in London, I usually get to know about it without any effort apart from reading my email.

I used Google Main to read my emails, so it has been very easy for me to set up filters for these newsletters - anything from any of the above gets filtered out of the inbox and labled ‘Things to do’, when I have time to spend a few moments absorbing the information I just navigate to that lable (or folder if you’re using another email programme) and read away. Easy.

That’s all very well if your living in or around London, but what if I’m living in New York? Well a few minutes googling for ‘New York things to do’ and you’ll find Time Out New York with a subscribe link at the top of the page for their newsletter. Or how about NYC Visit with a monthly newsletter? Sign up for anything htat looks interesting - you can always un-subscribe later on if it turns out the information is not for you.

I also subscribe to the Sitepoint newsletter. Sitepoint’s website contains articles about all aspects or web development. Their newsletter sends me the headlins and a description of new articles on their site, I may want to read them or I may not, but this is one way of staying on top of the all the new information and techniques that come out in my field.

Do you already subscribe to email newsletters? Maybe that website you go to ever few days to check for information has a newsletter - sign up, give it a go.

It’s easier than asking yourself “What shall I do today?” or “I wonder what new things people are doing in my industry today?”

There are 100s of different methods of being more productive out there. I’m sure each of you could name at least 3 different ones for emptying your inbox, your mind and if the internet is the beast I think it is - your sock draw.

Do you want to know the secret of productivity? Do you want to know which of those methods is the best? It’s the one you actually use yourself.

I’ll say that again, the best method of doing anything is the one you can actually be bothered to implement and invest your time in.

Why is it the best? Because out of the melting pot of theory’s and tips out there, this was this is the only one you thought was interesting enough to look into and give it a go - something appealed to you personally. Or in the case of your own personal method, you created it yourself to make your own life better / easier. And you keep doing it because it works.

That’s not to say you can’t learn a better method, but at this moment in time, with the information available to you right now, your way is the best way.

So what is The Cunning Code? It is a way of living my life easily, without the huge overhead of a full blown methodology with all that entails. Mostly small things, mostly small changes here and there that make life run smoothly, making life for me more bearable.

And yes, some of the things could be considered”Cheating” or lazy, but thats just part of the fun. That’s when you know it’s cunning