Not everyone can afford (or justify) a personal assistant. That's why Values on n, the folks behind Stikkit, have invented Sandy, your very own personal email assistant.

I Want Sandy helps you stay organized and productive by working with emails to yourself and turning them into to-do's, address book updates and calendar appointments. It all works by sending an email and CCing Sandy on it. Sandy understands basic terms like 'reminder', 'lookup' and 'update' and will then sort the content appropriately.

If you aren't up to your neck already in to-do applications, I Want Sandy could be a beneficial application to try out. The concept is straightforward, and it could definitely save time on scheduling and calendar updates. It is currently in beta form, and is accepting signups to join the queue for a free account. In the meantime, if you want to get a feel for how simple and straightforward yet powerful its creator's web applications are, sign up for a free account on Stikkit, their little yellow productivity tool.

We know, it's the middle of the summer, but it's never too early to start looking at what you might need for the upcoming semester. And if you are looking for another way to get, and stay organized while off at school, Notely might be your lecture note savior.

This online tool allows users to organize data from meetings, appointments, class notes, lectures, accessing it anywhere. There are a number of free features that the Notely application supplies, including:

• Calendar
• To-Do
• Homework Organizer
• Course Manager
• Notes
• Link, Contact and File Organizer
• Notebook/Lab book

Notely is a pretty powerful online application that can aid in keeping all class information together, in an easily managed interface. One main thing we wish it had, search. It would be nice to search for a phrase or keyword and have all related notes, calendar items, and course information show up. All of the content that users store in Notely can be exported as PDF, DOC, TXT, Excel and synced with iCal.

A similar online offering is stu.dicio.us.

Could PlanHQ be the differentiating factor on whether your business succeeds or fails? Well, no, but it could help you to set some goals and compare forecasts in order to run your business a little more smoothly.

At first glimpse, PlanHQ does not say much about what it does, other than it brings plans to life. Upon further digging users will discover that it's an online tool that helps business grow through planning, take business plans online, developing business plans from scratch, and helps investors report on the success of their investments.

There is a 30 day free trial plan, that lets users configure business plans, set goals for sales and customers, set target markets, outline team members and their skills, and plot out financial performance. Other plans are based on the amount of users and goals, and range from $15/month to $50/month.

[via eHub]

Getting and staying organized in any school level can be a little difficult, now there is a free online application that could help.

mySchoolog is an online application that students can easily use to track and organize their school lives. Users start off by entering lessons they take and organizing them into categories, and make weekly schedules. Schedules can be made through a drag and drop lesson planner with times associated for each class to keep them organized. Of course it has a to-do area where appointments, homework and anything else can be added, and reminders set to be sent out by email or sms. Lesson notes can be entered online, searched, exported and printed so they can be kept and used when required. 20GB of File storage is available for documents, audio or images, and can be categorized by lesson.

But really, is there any time to organize yourself while in school? Sometimes not, so hopefully this might help a bit.

After approximately a year of beta testing, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 is ready for prime time. Photoshop Lightroom is a software application that helps improve the digital photo workflow by providing a central point to organize and adjust digital images. It is a compliment to Photoshop, not a replacement.
If you didn't get a chance to check out the beta, you can download a 30-day trial of the released version. The retail price is set for $299, but if you order before April 30, 2007, you can snag a copy at the customer appreciation price of $199. Both Windows and Mac (Universal) systems are supported. A heads-up if you are currently running the 4.1 beta, it is set to expire February 28th.

Everyone has something they collect, stamps, video games, mobile devices, or applications. But how are you going to catalog your collection besides using Excel? Check out Squirl. They are on the move to unite collectors to catalog, organize and share their passion online. Plans start at a free level, which includes up to 200 items, three collections, and is ad supported. There is a $24.95 per year plan that has an unlimited number of items and collections. The Squirl database is loaded with collections if you just care to browse other peoples interesting collections, or see what salt and pepper shakers are out there waiting for you to grab. Build an auction tool into this application, and eBay can have some nice competition.

Check out some screenshots after the jump...

Rejoice, fellow Backpack users, for 37Signals today added a much-requested new feature for paid users: a calendar. As you may come to expect from the traditional KISS approach of 37Signals, the calendar is incredibly easy to use and enter appointments into. It's also 'smart', as it can figure out what events like "January 7 Catherine's birthday" and "6:30pm Dinner" mean, and it will place them where they need to go. Users can also create multiple calendars and assign unique colors to each, and events are pleasantly drag-and-drop-able between days. Unlike Google Calendar, this Backpack Calendar can remind you of events no matter which calendar they are entered into, however the reminders (at least for now) are set at a static 30 minutes before the event. Calendars are also shareable and subscribe-able via the iCal format, and just as with Backpack pages, calendar addresses are able to be reset, should you find a need to stop sharing one down the road. The one thing I haven't tested yet is whether this calendar has any kind of accessibility via Backpack mobile. If you try this out, sound off.

As a paid Backpack user (just the Basic $5 plan), I have to say: I am pleased. I retreated from using Google Calendar a little while ago, in part because of the silly limit of only being able to receive reminders for events in the Personal calendar, and no others. Plus, this is another great reason to start using my Backpack account even more, especially since I've found a killer offline Backpack client by the name of Packrat, which I've blogged on TUAW. One downer that I can see from this new calendar being a paid-only feature, however, is that (as far as I know) free account users don't have any way of testing it out. I guess freeloaders (just kidding) could spend the $5 to 'temporarily' upgrade and test it out, then simply downgrade if they aren't happy. Ultimately, I think this calendar feature is almost worth the $5 alone for any Backpack user looking for a little more organization in their lives.

It seems like every Firefox extension thinks it deserves a spot on my status bar, and most have no option to get rid of their little widget on the status bar. Organize Status Bar is an extension that gives you back control of Firefox's status bar. It lets you permanently move or remove any item from your cluttered status bar.