A few posts back, Paul from Screw The Man recommended iwantsandy as a personal organization tool. Paul, you rock. Thankyou.
Iwantsandy is a virtual personal assistant that you communicate with via email or voice. Sandy replies by sending you email or text messages. She can handle reminders, notes, lists, contacts, and appointments.
Sandy uses a semantic command structure, which means that you can talk to her as if she were a person. To tell Sandy to remind me about something I simply speed-dial 2 on my phone and say “Sandy remind me to pick up milk at 4″. At 3:45 Sandy sends me a text message that says “Pick up milk at 4″.
Sandy creates an ical feed of my appointments which I can view from any ical compatable calendaring application, and sends a daily agenda to my email every morning. I can also view my transaction log via RSS feed.
I use a service called Jott to talk to Sandy. The 1-800 number for the service is programmed into the speed dial on my phone. When I call up they ask me who I want to Jot and I say “Sandy”. There’s an immediate beep and I carry on with the rest of my sentence. When I stop talking Jott says “Got it!” then I hang up the phone. Jott transcribes my message and sends it to Sandy.
Sandy’s syntax does require a bit of a learning curve, and the set-up requires a good deal of fiddling with settings. This isn’t an instant implementation system. But its extremely powerfull, and will only become more so as it hooks into more APIs. Its worth my time to get comfortable with it.
In the process of getting Sandy set up I found another cool service that lets me use Jott to call in data entry items. Xspenser is an expense tracking application that allows you to record expenses immediately via Jott, email, text message, IM, twitter, or from your browser. Its very intuiutive.
I track all my income and collections through Freshbooks, and all my expenses through Xspenser. They both offer data export in popular book-keeping formats, so at the end of the year I’ll just email the information to my accountant. Beautiful, simple, elegant.
I’m still using Basecamp and Highrise for CRM and Project Management. I’m not entirely happy with these solutions. The features are limitted and the price is high. Finding an open source replacement that I can host on my own server is on my list of things to do. I’m also looking for a linux friendly document management program with tagging to manage my digital filing system.
On the web design front, I found BrowserShots, a free service that will provide you with screenshots of your website across all browser/platform combinations. For just $15 a month you can get priority processing, personal support, and an ads-free experience.
On the doc management tip I’m looking at Knowledge Tree for use here at work. I’ll let you know how it goes
Yay! Sandy is awesome. I still have the cheatsheet printed out in the hopes I’ll one day be able to have the prowess to actually add to, edit, and delete items from lists as well as send multiple requests at once.
I haven’t tried the whole Jott thing yet. My current favorite form of talking to Sandy is sending her direct Twitter Tweets from my Blackberry. But the IM and email are handy too.