The Lazy Guide to productivity

I am not ashamed to admit that I am lazy. When I worked in a pub at uni, my motto was “better to be bored than busy”. It meant that I had done everything I needed to do, and I was free to do what I wanted to do. I hate nothing more than when I haven’t got time for someone or something. “Sorry, I’m really snowed under today” (the English way of saying: f**k off and leave me alone to all our international readers out there) is not a productive way to work as a team.

Unfortunately getting snowed under happens all the time. For the best part of 2021 my team must have thought I was living in the artic because of the little time I had for them. The irony was, I didn’t have enough time to be lazy.

As you are also interested in being lazy, you’ve probably googled those same “marketing hacks” and “easy website tricks” blogs. They all say repetitive crap like “tHiNk AbOuT dOiNg ViDeO” or “eNgAgE wItH yOuR aUdIenCe MoRe”. thanks for nothing www.genericmarketingwebsite.com. They are not lazy blogs, they are just inept. There’s an important distinction between the two.

I’ve had a big problem in my production this year. It was being the bottleneck in the wider company ecosystem. I would get requests to code up a page or design the layout for something but straddling those skillsets you quickly become the gatekeeper for what passes through. What I think is important or right, might not be the correct thing in someone else’s head. You become the single point of failure because its your fault if you don’t complete it on time and it’s also your fault if it doesn’t do what you wanted it to do. So why not just stick one of those visual composer do-dads and let someone else do it…

Well that leads me to the second problem I’ve had this year. We manage a website with one of those drag and drop visual composers. Ignoring the sites many other problems (much like I do with my own), the time it takes to fiddle about with it is much longer than if I could just burn it down and code it from scratch.

Developers really like to rag on visual composers. Even though they are a pile of janky shite, deep down I think we realise it is the ever encroaching automation of everything that is coming for us all. Implementing it in a project is a cruel joke of willingly designing ourselves out of a job by choice. So we harden up and decide that bespoke, hand crafted websites are the only way to do things. They are if you want to do something special, but not everything needs to be a work of art. The art of just getting it to work is sometimes more valuable. So, I’m left with two problems:

As a lazy person, I need one solution to solve them both. How do I do that? Simples, make my own trusted website builder. If you trust the tech, you trust the people who use it. It’s not that hard to create. Granted it did take nearly an entire year to come to that realisation, but that’s the point about innovation, it’s a bit apple-on-the-head sort of stuff to make you realise what is already there. After chatting to my mate who works at a much larger digital agency, they actually do something similar (albeit less cool, than what I’ve made 😉 ). So, if it’s good enough for them, good enough for me. Lazy people of the world UNITE!

The Ultimate Landing Page Builder

By NOW|Comms

The two Ronnie Approach

wot a lovely pair

Have you noticed that I have two titles for pretty much everything? It’s the same reason why Ant is never without Dec, or why Bert and Ernie are the most memorable Sesame Street characters. It’s their call and response delivery of dialogue that keep the rhythm of the piece going.  It also does a stellar job of  shaping the design of the page. That’s one less element I need to think up as part of the overall page design. Two Ronnie’s one joke.

I find it very difficult to convey a coherent thought process, so by having two stabs at the same thing I negate the process of self editing. You can just let the creative juice flow and throw words around until they stick.