IWantSandy.com Review

   Several weeks ago, I signed up for IwantSandy.com. IWantSandy is a virtual personal assistant which is really scheduler and reminder program. The cool thing about Sandy though is that she will contact you in pretty much any way you choose. Email, SMS and Twitter are all ways that she can get ahold of you.

Sandy also has some pretty heavy duty natural language processing power for a web application. A normal interaction for me would be to send Sandy an email along the lines of:

Remind me to set out the trash on Sunday night @ weekly

When I send this message, Sandy schedules a reminder for Sunday night (approx 6pm my local time) and then will send me an email (which is the default contact method) when it is time to send out the trash.

Sandy will also remember lists and facts (like phone numbers etc…) and can also send reminder to other people if you CC them on a message to Sandy. I never really ended up using this function.

My only real gripe, is that if you don’t give Sandy a specific time to remind you of something, she can be somewhat capricious in when she schedules the reminders. For instance, I got a reminder at 9:40 am to study for the CISSP every day and after attempting to change the time the reminder was sent several times I just gave up on it.

Sandy was fun to try, but I just never really fell into the habit of using her. I guess I really need a more flexible system that is less deadline dependent, so I have returned to my beloved MonkeyGTD at TiddlySpot for my task management needs.

Sandy is free and alot of fun to use (compared to some other appointment based task managers) and may work incredibly well for some people. For me, it just ended up being more hassle then it was worth.

If you’d like to give Sandy a try you can sign up here.