Streamline like the Dutch with start.io

Today I have a guest post from Adam Hoek, an indie artist in the Netherlands. Adam always has some great advice for musicians looking for productivity tips, creating revenue streams and living the indie musician lifestyle. Today it’s all about productivity. Enjoy.

As an Australian musician living in the Netherlands, I am often confronted with the dutch language and culture. I would say I am more relaxed where the dutch are more streamlined. They just get things done. No beating around the bush. If they don’t like you, they will tell you straight to your face. Like a child telling you that you are fat. It’s pretty in your face sometimes.

A lot of the time these guys don’t even use spaces in their words. They just combine them all into a long string of sounds. And let me tell you one thing. those words get seriously long.

I’ll let you know the longest word at the bottom of this post.

But under their rough exterior, the dutch are lovely people once you get to know them, and they have changed the way I look at life. I have joined their culture and I now streamline my life in any way I can.

I’m sure most of you have heard about firefox and its many apps and a few of you are scoffing at me thinking that only chrome will do. Well what I want to share with you today will make your life more streamlined no matter what browser you are using.

Welcome to ‘www.start.io’.

I just want to tell you up front that I am not sponsored by start.io nor really have anything to do with them besides holding an account. I’m just a user, as I’m sure you will soon be as well.

A problem I run into as an indie musician, is that I often find it difficult to keep all my links + tabs in order. I am constantly updating my site, checking my email, getting my twitter on and writing up newsletters. There is just no way that I can remember all of these links! Sure I could go to my bookmarks or favorites… but what a hassle man.That is not the dutch way! I used to even set up my browser so that when it opened it would open all the sites at once. But that just slowed down my life instead of speeding it up. There had to be a better way.

After some searching I found a site called 43marks.com and it did exactly what I wanted. The drawback though was that it was ugly as sin. I felt like I was back in the 90’s when the Internet was made entirely if bright colors and GIF animations. I felt ashamed having it as my home page. Then I found 43mark’s younger sexier sister. And boy is she sweet.

Start.io is a homepage site that you can set up yourself. You can set up all of the links that you often use and categorise them as well for easier access. Its all free and setting it all up is a piece of cake, and who doesn’t love a good piece of cake?

When your all done editing, in the top right you will see a URL that looks like this start.io/yourname save that page as your homepage and then get back to work and quit playing farmville.

Congratulations you just streamlined your life. You are now 1 part dutch.

(side note)When logging in, in the future, your user name is not your email address you used to sign up. I learnt this the hard way…many lives were lost. I hope that you don’t have to go through the same.

Below are some more tips for starting your own start.io homepage.

Password: If you want you can set up a password for your page so that it can not be accessed by your friends/family/cat

Name: If you want to be extra secure make your name is something crazy like ‘un1c0rn’ instead of your regular name.

Pimp it: You can choose from a selection of layouts via the settings tab then clicking on layouts to the right. However if you are some kind of inter-tubular web wizard you can change up the html code to make it as lovely as you so desire.

Phone-ify: Nothing says streamline like doing your work on the road! If your always on the move, then instead of going to http://start.io/username try http://i.start.io/username on your iPhone or http://m.start.io/username on your other phone.

All right, so you ready for the longest dutch word? Here it is

hazewindshondhalsbandslotsleutelgaatjesm­akersstageloopersleerling – That word is 66 characters long my friends. Want to know what it means? Then go to adamhoek.com/chocolate.html for the translation!

How are you streamlining your life and business? Let me know in the comments!

ADAMHOEK is an Australian singer/songwriter living and working in the Netherlands. He sounds like a 3 way love child of John Mayer, Newton Faulkner and Tony Lucca. Check out some free tracks he is giving away at adamhoek.com/chocolate.html

Tags: adam hoek, guest post, Music Marketing, productivity, startio