Word Forward

An essential part of being self-employed is good organisation. And part of being well organised is efficient timekeeping. VAs with multiple clients like myself need an effective way of tracking time spent on projects in order to be accountable to both clients and the accountant! For the past couple of years I’ve been using HourGuard, a downloadable free timekeeping program from the excellent NCH range of software. I liked HourGuard because it stopped and started timing automatically if I had to step away from the keyboard. I also liked that it was easy to add notes and was overall very simple to use. But with an increasing variety of tasks of shorter duration, I became frustrating with it’s basic reporting and so began the hunt for a more appropriate option.

I found Grindstone. This great time tracking software has very comprehensive reporting tools. I also love that it prompts me to start timing when I return to the computer.  Another fantastic aspect is that Grindstone can be linked to Twitter for selected clients to automatically tweet whenever you start timing a new task. Why is this so great? Twitter is a platform that requires a lot of TLC (i.e. input) to be effective but like many, I don’t log in and tweet often enough. Grindstone does it for me. Prospective clients get to see not only that I’m working, but also the range of services I offer. I recently picked up a medical transcription job through Twitter because Grindstone had been tweeting the work I’d been doing.

Best of all, it’s free!

There are some very clever scammers out there; it’s not always easy to pick them, especially when they are hidden behind a legitimate business enterprise. eBay scams spring to mind where official eBay emails are copied and then embedded with links to sites intended to defraud the reader. An obvious sign of a scam is poor spelling and grammar because the perpetrators are often based overseas. Sometimes further research is necessary.

Recently I received a fax from a company called ‘Upskilled’ about government funded rebates for training courses. Everything looked quite legitimate but a few things raised flags with me. For starters, the email wasn’t addressed to anyone. It was titled, ‘Attention: All Managers- Administration, Operations, HR, Sales, Project’. That’s a fairly big scope! As I operate a virtual office, I wasn’t sure if the email was intended for me or one of my clients. Further reading showed that the three page document had several punctuation errors and typos such as missing periods at the end of sentences, spaces in the middle of words and a fairly obvious tautology in “…a maximum of $3890, yet however, upon course completion…”

A tautology is saying the same thing twice using different words. Yet and however both have the same meaning. Yet  means “inspite of that/all the same/nevertheless”, however usually means “but” but can also mean “nevertheless/all the same”.

Curious, I looked up the website which contained similar errors of which just a few examples are:

“Upskilleds’ program are delivered by Upskilled’s expert trainers” – apostrophe in two different places in the same sentence. ‘Program’ is singular, ‘are’ is plural.

“There are guidelines that govern the eligibly for funding…” Eligibly is not a word.

I did a further search on one of the trainers who appears to be involved in three seperate companies at the same time. Another search highlighted the whole thing as a scam. I remain unconvinced either way. For that reason, and the fact that I wouldn’t want to send my employees on a course run by a company that can’t communicate effectively, the fax ended up in the bin.