Let me introduce you to Birthday Alarm A website that remembers and reminds you about upcoming birthdays.

Once you have set up an account and logged in you can start adding birthdays - you can either send out an email to your friends and family asking them to fill in a form for you, but I think that spoils the illusion we’re trying to create here, so we want to Manually Add birthdays - which is possible but the link doesn’t shout out at you.

Click on ‘My Reminders’ the ‘Add Birthdays’, the the add birthday reminders manually link at the bottom of the right hand column.

Then all you need to do is fill in what you know

Birthday Alarm will then email you before your friend’s birthdays - I have mine set up to send me emails 10 days before, then 3 days before as that gives me enough time to buy a pressent and post it if necessary.

You don’t need to sit down and fill in everyone at once, when ever you remember a birthday pop it into the list then, within a year you should have everyone you need in there.

Maximise your Cunning

1. Add everyone to your list, you can always delete them in a years time if you don’t know them but remebering your co-workers birthdays or your mother’s friend’s daughter’s and saying ‘Happy Birthday’ to them on the day will earn you ‘brownie points’ and help enchance your images of she who knows all
2. Add years as and when you can. The emails you receive will tell you how old the person is going to be, very useful, especially for children who never seem to be the age you thought they were
3. Add anerversaries as well on the anerversaries tab, even if you don’t send your best friend a card on her wedding anerversary, she’s apreciate the fact that you remembered when it was.

You may think the above is all rather cynicle but the fact is, I at hopeless at rememebing dates but I want to! I would feel terrible if I forgot my brother’s birthday. This tool helps me remember and gives me time to think of a toughtful pressent and send it.

And for all your GTDers out there… think of this as a Tickler file!

How do you remember birthdays and anerversaries? Do you forget them year after year? Do you not care?

As every woman knows, unless you can be described as having a chest like two peas on an ironing board, wearing a good bra is essential. A good bra turns a mediocre outfit into a stunning outfit, it makes you and your body look amazing. A bad bra can make you look older, saggy and dis-proportioned not to mention being uncomfortable and giving your a bad back and neck pains which can develop into long term problems that don’t go away when you unhook at the end of the day.

But more important than making you look good and function properly, a good bra makes you feel good. You know you’re looking your best, you’re going in the right direction, figurately and, well, literally.

And where do the pants come in? Well, they match the bra of course. They complement it, you know which bra goes with which pants because they match.

So what has this all got to do with managing your life you ask? We’re here to improve our lives, not for underwear advice.

It’s a metaphor. Get the foundations right and what you build on them will be better than what it is on it’s own. You feel more confident about your foundations so you stop worrying about them and concentrate on the top layer - which is what the client sees.

Take programming - most programmers / development teams have foundation classes they have written - frameworks and so on - that they build their applications on top of, if these foundations are shakey the programmer will never have full confidence in the application. How ever good the top layers are, if you’re not happy about the underneath parts what’s the point?

Imagine a world class builder building a magnificent structure with sub-standard bricks. The house wouldn’t look good, the builder and owners would not be confident in it so could not relax and use it for its purpose (living in) properly and you would eventually get long term problems - just like wearing a bad bra.

Back to the pants metaphor - have you ever seen control pants? From the outside you look pretty amazing, you feel good about how you look, but when you take that dress off you’re faced with yards and yards of elastic, and under that, fat. Your foundations are not right and you’re just covering them up. Now there’s nothing wrong with that if we’re just talking about pants, but what if we’re talking about your kitchen? Have you packed all the spare parts of your kitchen gagets into a large box and put it at the back of hte cupboard? Yes your cupboard looks tidy but open that box to find your whisk attatchement and you’re right back to where you started - cluttered.

Would you ever go straight to secondary school without going to pre-school and primary school first? No, you need that foundation of knowledge, if your brain was a bust, what ever education you get before the stage your at now are the under wires… I’m taking this metaphor too far now, but what I’m trying to say is this - Get the foundations right and you have the support and confidence to concentrate on the next stage - the one that makes the impact.

p.s. if you’re in Reading, Berkshire - go to Pudding for lingerie,

"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?

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?”

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

Do you ever think, there must be a better way of doing this? Of dealing with the..stuff.. of life?

Well there is, the Cunning way.

This blog will contain my ideas, thoughts, methods and theories for following the Code of Cunning. There is a better way of wading though this thing we call life. I believe we can squeeze more fun out of life by being just a little bit more efficient on the dull, admin part of our lives. A few seconds saved here and there, half a day saved by not losing things, problems avoided because of your cunning plans - before you know it, you’ll have gained days back to do things far more interesting than the day-to-day humdrum.

I want to be happier, I don’t want to feel I’m suffocating under the debris of my life… There WILL be a way to cope and still smile. I like instant results, I want it all now - I don’t want to jump though the hoops some ‘life management’ theory’s set up, so I’m making my own!

This blog will document our Cunning Plans

Sounds fun doesn’t it?