Despite having fifteen years bureaucratic and administrative experience, I still don’t like office work. Routine paperwork overwhelms me to the point where I want to commit cold-blooded murder, I hate answering letters and emails, I hate having to remember appointments, birthdays, bills, and all the other routine drudgery that goes with life. I just want to write my articles, surf the internet and read my books. In other words, the simple life.

Unfortunately my finances are not at the point where I can afford a real live personal assistant so when I found I Want Sandy, I decided “what the hell, what have I got to lose?”. OK, she can’t sit on my knee in a short mini-skirt and a loose revealing top but hey I don’t have to pay her!

After giving her a probationary period, my opinion is that she is good but she hasn’t totally rocked my world. Here’s two reasons why :

1. She’s just a Reminder Bot

Let’s be honest here. She just reminds you of appointments. How many other online services out there do that? Yahoo Calendar? Google Calendar? Twitter? There’s a Twitter service called Timer which reminds you via Direct Message of anything you need to remember. Sandy isn’t much different. She also sends reminders to Twitter if you want that. It’s hardly original is it? Sorry Sandy. Don’t cry. Here’s the business card of my therapist.

So if you need to remember something, you just need to send an email to Sandy with the word “remember” or “remind” in it and the details of what you want her to remember. So something like :

“remember my dentist’s appointment on Friday at 10.00am” OR “remind me to pick up the kids from my mother at 3.30pm”

You’ll then get a message nearer the time reminding you (you can specify how far in advance you want to be reminded).

Plus every morning (at a time you specify) you will get an email with your appointments for that day and any reminders you’ve asked her to remember for you. You can also have it sent to your mobile phone (if your network supports it) or Twitter. It works well but as I said, there ARE lots of other similar services out there.

2. I couldn’t get Sandy to synchronise with my Google Calendar

Despite claims that Sandy “synchronizes with third-party calendaring programs and services (e.g. Google Calendar, 30 Boxes, iCal, Outlook 2007)”, I could not for the life of me get Sandy to accept my Google calendar events. It would not accept my Google calendar iCalendar feed and kept pushing its own feed at me.

This means that you would have to manually re-enter all your calendar entries into Sandy which is irritating and time-consuming. I thought Sandy was supposed to help me? Instead she’s driving my blood pressure UP!

If you can work out a way to get Sandy to synchronise with Google Calendar then you can help her save her job with Mark O’Neill Worldwide Enterprises. Otherwise, I’ll be sending her back to Burger King to flip burgers and clean toilets. Readers, it’s over to you. Save Sandy!

(By) Mark O’Neill is a blogger and professional freelance writer. Check out his blog at BetterThanTherapy.net

Tagged: calendar • email • productivity • reminder • to-do