Introducing Sandy, my new, perky, budget-friendly personal secretary
C’mon, you know there’s a part of you that’s always looked wistfully at those high-powered executives on TV and thought, “If I only had someone who answered my phone/organized my schedule/reminded me of my appointments/filed my papers/screened my visitors/picked up my dry cleaning, I would get so much more done.”
No? The delusions of grandeur (not to mention increased efficiency) are all mine?
OK, how about this … do you use your email inbox as a to-do list of sorts, only you kinda forget to do the stuff that falls to the bottom of the list of emails?
No? OK, do you ever say, “Remind me to …” and your friends say, “Why don’t you remind yourself”?
No? Well, then you’re a lucky person indeed.
I admit to all of the above, and so when I heard about IWantSandy.com, with its promise of a perkily-bobbed assistant who would remind me of stuff exactly when I asked her to, for free, I leapt on it.
Basically, you set up an account that gives you a personalized email address. Send an email to that address like, “Remind me to call hot water heater company today at 2pm,” and you’ll get a reminder email that arrives in your inbox precisely when you asked for the reminder. The default settings also send you a daily digest of your reminders. There are lots of other nifty tricks — like a way to use RSS to connect your reminders to your Outlook email box, or even the opportunity to “snooze” a to-do item to the next day, that I’m still figuring out.
And if you’ve got nothing to remember that day? You get an email like this:
Shoot. Can I “snooze” that until tomorrow?