Outsourcing Your Life: I Want Sandy (Iwantsandy.com)

I have recently become fascinated by the idea of outsourcing your life. Wouldn't it be nice to let someone else keep track of all of the minutiae, do the grunt work, make the calls and the follow-up calls to the dentist or plumber or whatever?

There are a number of services that do this sort of thing mostly on a project to project basis. I was particularly fascinated, however, by GetFriday, with its offer (at very reasonable rates) to take care of ANYTHING that does not require your personal presence. Wow!

Now comes Sandy. Unlike the other services, this one is automated. It is also free so I am trying it out. So far it is about as easy to work with as you could imagine. Once you sign up (painlessly, BTW), you just CC Sandy on anything containing a date or a requirement and she files it away and sends you reminders to either your email or cell phone (via SMS). Yes, I could do all of this myself in Outlook but Sandy parses the language for you, puts the date, times and people in the right places and sends you a note to tell you it has all been taken care of. You just have to remember to CC her. You can even have her send reminders to everyone else on the CC list if you want. What a great tool for working in a small group!

As with all services such as this, I am sure there are bound to be failures and hiccups but so far it is working very well. My biggest concerns are that I will forget to use the service, that old habits will die hard or that it will become more trouble than it is worth. Ultimately, I think I can count on my innate sense of laziness to determine what works best.