Your very own personal assistant, and she works for free

Productivity junkies and GTDers listen up, we are about to lay some serious iPhone kung-fu on you. These moves will give you that extra edge to move your projects forward almost effortlessly. After we learned this trick we felt like we just finished watching The Secret (no, we’re not going to link to it, they’ve made enough money). And if you don’t know what The Secret is, just think positive and read on.

First off, we’d like you to meet Sandy, your new personal assistant. Sandy is absolutely wonderful. She has a perfect memory, doesn’t talk back, and works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And best of all, she works for free!

To get Sandy working for you, simply register for a new account at iwantsandy.com. You will receive a custom email address for Sandy that you will then want to add to your contacts. Now anytime you want Sandy to remember or remind you of something, send her an email with the items in the subject or body of the message. Sandy understands natural language and various date and time formats so you can send her something like this, “remind me to pay the iphone bill on wednesday at 9 am”. That command will cause Sandy to send you an email reminder on the due day fifteen minutes prior to the due time. You could also substitute “wednesday” for “wed”, or “in four days”, or “11/28″, or almost any other format you can think of. And if you cc other contacts on the message and start your command with, “Sandy, remind us…”, then the entire list of recipients on the email will receive the reminder. In fact, your command can be included within a longer text message. Just start your command with “Sandy” for the parts you want her to pay attention to. We can’t tell you enough how cool that is, and it gets even better.

Sandy also remember things for you like recurring events, phone numbers, passwords or just about any information you can think of. She’s smart enough to understand names and addresses and will automatically parse your messages and add people to your contacts list. She also creates to-do lists on-the-fly, and GTDers will be happy to know that you can tag almost any item with a context. You can call up any of this information securely on her web site. All of your data is organized into contact lists, to-do items, and calendar events.

Now this is all pretty marvelous and Sandy gets our vote for desktop web app of the year, but when you consider her additional skills, she absolutely shines on the iPhone. Sandy understands shorthand commands which saves you lots of tapping on your iPhone. You can also ask Sandy to lookup any of the information you have asked her to store. For instance, sending her a message such as, “lookup jessica’s favorite restaurant” will cause Sandy to email the information back to you immediately. This is handy with iPhone’s Mail.app so you don’t have to go to the web site in Safari and look up the info yourself. You can also set Sandy to send you updates via SMS instead of email.

Sandy is even more efficient if you take advantage of her integration with Jott, a free voice-to-text service which is great on it’s own, and unbelievably awesome when used along with Sandy and your iPhone. Sending voice mail to Sandy with Jott is the same as emailing her, only much more efficient since you are talking instead of tapping. To get this working you’ll need to sign up for a free account at Jott.com. Then enable the Jott option in Sandy’s settings. Once this is set up, you can speed dial Jott from your iPhone and speak your commands to Sandy. It’s brilliant.

There’s one more thing about Sandy you should know. She will address you with any name of your choice when sending messages to you. Forcing your personal assistant to call you “Darling” or “Sweet-cheeks” would normally land you in court these days, but not with our loyal and submissive Sandy. Be creative with this setting and her daily email digests will always put a smile your face.

Get to know Sandy better

• Read The Sandy Guide to learn more about her skills
• She also has this handy cheatsheet
• Go sign up for Sandy now at iwantsandy.com

Sandy Trivia

• Sandy was created by Values of n, and powered by Stikkit
• Sandy was named after the real life personal assistant to Tim O’Reilly