Family
Working from Home With Kids
I readily admit that one of the driving factors behind my having started my virtual legal assistant business is to be more available to my children. And especially in this first year of business, I’m growing slowly enough not to have needed much in the way of childcare, and yet I can still meet my clients’ needs. I love how the internet can help me do this!!
As I get busier and busier though, I am faced with the types of concerns that plague work from home parents everywhere. How do I manage things like phone calls when I have a toddler underfoot? I’m lucky in that my older two kids will be in school shortly and that gives me 2 days a week where it’s only the toddler at home with me. I’ve even, finally, begun the process of finding some childcare for him, but full-time care isn’t really in my plans right now and that means there are going to be times when I must either find a way to keep him busy while on the phone with a client or during an interview, or risk looking very unprofessional.
Thankfully the same beautiful internet that offers me so many opportunities and so much information doesn’t come up short with suggestions for how to work around this problem. There’s the list of 94 ways to keep kids busy over at Sparkplugging, 15 activities from the At Home Mom Blog, 10 independent play activities from About.com and a great general advice article on working from home with kids from Jonathan Lane at Canada.com.
Of course if I could ever just find that mute button that actually works on kids, that would be the ideal solution….in my dreams anyway!
Laurie Mapp, Owner Halo Secretarial Services Contact me for more information on virtual legal assistance!
Read More
Some Friday Fun
Working from home as a virtual legal assistant is not all work – no play! In fact, one of the best things about working for myself from home is the ability to have flexibility in my day. Today I have had quite a varied day already and it’s not even 2pm yet! I’ve done some client work, reviewed next week’s schedule on my calendar, bought buspasses for my kindergarten/grade two kiddos and had the pleasure of a phone conversation with Vicki Voisin of The Paralegal Mentor.
Next up in my day is a very rare evening out with my best friend and then a weekend of about half work and half fun.
If you want a little bit of relaxation this Friday afternoon, here are a couple of fun links for you:
Want to see a fun little graph of how the Internet sees You? Try this link (my graph is below, and semi-accurate, lol)
Some truly hilarious quotes over at The “Blog” of Unnecessary Quotes (hat tip to @RandallMoeller)
And a couple of my favorite little jokes from a recent forwarded email. I never even READ forwarded joke emails normally, but this had me laughing hysterically (ok some of the funnier ones turn out not to be blog post appropriate, sorry, but still these are good!):
Is it just me, or are 80% of the people in the “people you
may know” feature on facebook people that I do know, but i deliberately
choose not to be friends with?I like all of the music in my iTunes, except when it’s on
shuffle, then I like about one in every fifteen songs in my itunes.It really pisses me off when I want to read a story on
CNN.com and the link takes me to a video instead of text.
Have a great weekend!!
Laurie Mapp, Owner Halo Secretarial Services Contact us for more information on virtual legal assistance!
Read More
Home Office Inspiration
It’s been a hectic week here at Halo Secretarial and I know when things get hectic here a little inspiration is in order to help me take some deep breaths and remember why I started my virtual legal assistant business! So here’s my inspiration tip for today: find a quotation (or two!) and post them somewhere around your desk and read them in moments when you are feeling stressed or unhappy or you are simply lacking motivation. You can write the quote on a sticky note, or frame it or whatever idea your creativity finds!
I bought some cool wall rub-ons that are inspirational and this is the one in my office (I love that it is huge-makes you really notice it!):
Perfect for a day when the kids are running a little crazy and you haven’t been outside in days even though it’s sunny and you stayed up late one too many times this week! Not that I’m saying my week was like that or anything 
Hope my little inspiration makes you smile or motivates you to do something similar!
Laurie Mapp, Owner Halo Secretarial Services Contact us for more information on virtual legal assistance!
Read More
Vacationing Virtual Legal Assistant Returns
My poor neglected blog. I was away for a week and while I fully intended to try and get a post or two up while on vacation it totally didn’t happen! We got in later each day than I had expected and there just wasn’t time for much at all, let alone blogging about virtual legal assistance! Disneyland was great though and we got in a couple of trips to the beach, although the weather wasn’t so hot!
I learned a couple of lessons about attempting to work while on vacation with three small kids and two other adults. It doesn’t work so well. I definitely was able to check my email 1-2 times per day and respond to urgent messages. I also was able to complete a couple of projects and tasks for clients. I felt guilty about missing so much work time and would have liked to have made more time for my business, but also felt guilty about holding up the rest of my group when I was trying to get things done. So first lesson is that vacations of one week should probably include as little work as possible!
I also learned I should communicate a little better with my clients. I let them all know I’d be away, but didn’t send out last-day reminders which I think would be an improvement they would appreciate. Not that I’m planning another vacation for this summer (other than a long weekend to BlogHer in July!), still it’s important to plan a little better.
I’m very happy to be home though and once I’m caught up on a couple of things I might even have more time to blog and twitter again! In the meantime, here are a couple more vacation pics that I thought I’d share.
Laurie Mapp, Owner Halo Secretarial Services Contact us for more information on virtual legal assistance!
Read More
Working Vacation
Mostly this is just a note to let you know that I’ll be taking a quick vacation at the end of this month, just for a week! It should be a wonderful time, we’re travelling as a family to California! It’s the first time on a plane for two of my boys, and the first plane trip my oldest will remember. He went to Mexico when he was 13 mos old, but of course doesn’t recall anything!
This will also be a first for me – the first time I test working while being so far from my home base. I think it should go well, I’ll have internet access at the hotel and plan to be in early most nights so the kids can keep to their general sleep routine. This should give me a couple of solid hours of worktime at night, and I can definitely squeeze in a bit of time in the morning to check on email etc. I don’t really spend more billable time than that yet, so mostly I’m reducing (or oh my goodness eliminating) my networking/socializing/blogging time. Yes, that’s right, I’ll barely be seen on Twitter those days! Normally I could easily twitter from my phone, but unfortunately Canadian cell phone rate plans don’t carry over to the US, so while I will of course have my phone with me I won’t be using it for fun activities like Twitter!
While considering my options for work/vacation, I was reading blog posts and saw this one about answering emails on vacation over at BlogHer. I actually am happy to keep up with my work while on my vacation, I would definitely find it a little stressful to think about being completely unconnected while away! The ability to work anywhere was something I was excited about when first starting my virtual legal assistant business up after all!
I also read this post about going on vacation in a wired world. It has some great tips and I’m trying to follow many of them! For example, I’ve already let my clients know that I’ll be away, shared what I could handle and suggested that I won’t be able to do “extra” work that week above what has been agreed. I wanted to give them plenty of warning so that I could do any work needed ahead of time.
I’ll be taking a couple of other mini-vacations this summer, but only for 3 to 4 days at a time, hopefully this longer first time goes well and doesn’t leave me anxious about the other short trips!
Laurie Mapp, Owner Halo Secretarial Services Contact us for more information on virtual legal assistance!
Read More
Merry Christmas
I know, it’s not Christmas for a few days yet. But I’m not really planning on blogging much, or even – gasp – Tweeting that much, over the next few days. I am doing work for my clients and some research for a project, but otherwise this week is about family. I’ll be enjoying my children, getting together with friends, and doing even more baking in preparation for dinner on the big day (next on the agenda is homemade pie!!)
In fact today, I actually kept my laptop off for several hours (I hate to have it off during the day, lol) and put together a gingerbread house and gingerbread Santa sleigh with my older boys. It was a wonderful afternoon and I hope you all are able to enjoy your family and friends as 2008 draws to a close.
So Merry Christmas everyone, and Happy Holidays!
p.s. I will have posts up next week – be sure to check in!!
Laurie Mapp, Owner Halo Secretarial Services Contact us for more information on virtual legal assistance!
Read More