Why IWantSandy And Why You Will Too

It must have been at the beginning of this year that I signed up to be a beta tester for iWantSandy, everyone’s personal email assistant. I finally received the invitation and want to tell you about what she does.

Just like a real assistant, she’ll help you keep organized and on time while helping you use email more productively. Let’s say you’re in a meeting or stuck in traffic and you remember you need to send a report to a co-worker, pick up some groceries – whatever. With your cell phone you could email Sandy the following message, “remind me to send Bob the weekly status report today at 3pm”.

She’ll then email you a reminder at 3pm with that exact message.

Her secret lies in the keywords you use. For example, you can even write an email to your buddy and Cc: Sandy. When you do that, you can configure your account (tell Sandy) to notify your friend, too. And if you also want to tell Sandy to do something specifically, you can tell her in the same message. Just say, “Sandy, please remember to [and put whatever you want her to remember for you].”

Tasks she can do:

• lookup
• forget
• update
• @todo
• @done
• @daily
• @weekly
• @monthly
• @yearly

She sends you a daily digest of your list of things. Each one is numbered which enables you to specify which one you want Sandy to do something with. So if number 1 is “meet Bob at 1pm”, you could change it to “2pm” if you needed to simply by using the update tag along with specifying the number 1 task.

Email isn’t the only way to get to your items. You can login to your account and view a list of everything you’ve ever sent her, or select from the types of items like reminders.

When she recognizes that you’ve included a contact or calendar event in the email you send her, she’ll send you back an email with an attachment you can use to upload into Microsoft Outlook.

As I mentioned before, this service is in beta. So if they ever offer the chance for beta testers to send out invitations to friends, I’ll post again to indicate so.

[tags]productivity,email,iwantsandy[/tags]