In light of the coming of Spring this week, I'm going to give some insight on how I manage my schedule with the virtual personal assistant Sandy.
Who is Sandy and what does she do?
Sandy is a personal assistant what works through your email inbox. She was written by the company Values of N and uses natural-language algorithms that were developed in the stikkit project. Many people shy away from Sandy because of the fact that she works through your inbox, but the manner in which she works makes it feel like you actually have a personal assistant.
Natural Language Algorithms?
The natural-language algorithms that Sandy uses are described as: Sandy understands a simple shorthand that feels natural to read and write. Mention a date or time and Sandy will put it on the calendar and email you a reminder (and/or send a text message to your cellphone) when the time comes. Sandy understands a number of date and time notations.
To get a full understanding of how Sandy works, you'll need to read her help file.
How to use Sandy and some examples:
Like I said earlier, Sandy works through your email. For example, lets say Mark calls you and wants you to bring your laser pointer for a presentation on Tuesday. Sure, you could write a reminder on a sticky note and put it on your desk, but how do you know this note won't get covered by other papers? Instead, you could send Sandy an email. All you need to include in the email is: remember to bring laser pointer to presentation on Tuesday at 2:30 pm @work @sms
No subject or other info is needed. Lets take a look at how Sandy dissects this message:
First, you have the words "remember to". This tells Sandy that you are setting an appointment or reminder. Other words that could go here that mean the same thing are "remind me to" and just "r". Next comes the actual appointment details: "bring laser pointer to presentation". After that is the time that you want to be reminded. In this case, its "on Tuesday at 2:30 pm". Lastly, the tags are applied to reminder. Tags are indicated by the "@" symbol. Tags can be anything you want, but some common ones are: @todo @work @school and @personal. There are also special tags such as @reply, which tells Sandy to send a confirmation reply regarding the appointment you just sent, @sms, which tells Sandy to send the reminder to your cell phone, and @twitter, which sends your reminder via twitter. Special tags can also make things repeat:- By day: @daily, @bidaily (every 2 days), @weekends (Sat and Sun), @weekdays (Mon through Fri)
- By week: @weekly, @biweekly (every 2 weeks)
- By month: @monthly, @bimonthly (every 2 months), @quarterly (every 3 months)
- By year: @yearly, and @biyearly (every 2 years).
Simple, right?
Sandy's Lists
Lists are a great way to organize info. To do lists, grocery lists, top-ten lists. All very useful. Sandy can keep lists and remember them for you automatically. Right now, I have a running list of blog post ideas that I keep with Sandy. All I have to do is send an email to Sandy that says "remember Write about using Sandy for managing your schedule @blog" and Sandy automagically appends that item to my blog ideas list which is indicated by the @blog tag. To look up these lists, all I have to do is send an email to Sandy that says "lookup @blog" and Sandy sends a return email with all of the items with the tag @blog. You can use the same lookup function for any day, date range, contacts, appointments, notes, bookmarks, to-dos, or lists.
Using Sandy with Jott
One way that I love to use Sandy is with Jott. All you do is set up a Jott link with Sandy and you can easily call in appointments, to dos, lists, etc. Its very handy when your on-the-go and you don't want to forget something.
SMS/Text
Sometimes you aren't in the right setting to make a phone call to Jott, but you still want to send Sandy a reminder. The easy way to do this is add you cell phone in Sandy's settings and your done. You can add the tag @sms to an appointment or reminder to have it sent to your phone. Values of N makes it very easy to use your cell phone with Sandy.
However, my mobile phone service, Verizon, puts my name in place of my phone number when I send SMS messages to an email, so Sandy doesn't recognize my phone. To get around this, I set up a filter in Gmail to forward anything sent to gmailuser+sandy@gmail.com to Sandy. That way I can send something from my phone to gmailuser+sandy@gmail.com and Sandy will receive it with no problem.
Google Calendar/Outlook Feed
If you use Google Calendar or Outlook, you can easily download a feed that will display your appointments and reminders from Sandy in a calendar format. This is very useful for printing purposes or for people who just prefer the traditional calendar view.
Sandy has many more features than what I mention here, many of which I still have not taken advantage of. This was supposed to be just a quick overview on how Sandy manages your info and how you can take advantage of this great product. Hopefully, after reading this, you'll see how easy it is to get a hold of your schedule when using Sandy. If you don't use Sandy, let me know how you manage you schedule in the comments. Any specific programs, services, or GTD systems that you use?
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