I read a great article thanks to a tweet by @lisasolomon today about a law office where parents can bring their babies to work with them – not just occasionally either!! Now that’s work-life balance for sure.

I’ve heard of some pretty wonderful sounding law offices ever since I started my virtual legal assistant business and had my eyes opened to alternative ways of doing things within the legal profession, but I think this is definitely near the top of the list in my opinion. It’s a small change, and yet it is HUGE for people who want that elusive “all” that we hope is out there somewhere. I think I especially liked that the initiative applies to lawyers and staff, as long as they don’t abuse the process!

I would have been shocked had any of the traditional firms I worked in ever offered a person to bring in their infant on a regular basis. Admittedly, since I’m from Canada many people were able to take a fair bit of time off after having a child without losing their job. Still, I actually think some people would have happily returned to work more quickly given the option to bring baby along. Our maternity is usually only partially paid and some people would love to keep a full paycheque without having to put a young child into full-time childcare. Actually, most of my places of employment frowned strongly on bringing children almost anytime, despite official initiatives like “bring your child to work day” or the like.

Fortunately for me, being self-employed allows me that elusive “all” that I had hoped for once I had my children. I can get my boys off the bus and then get right back to business while they enjoy an afterschool snack. I can fit document drafting around naptimes and usually still have time for a quick park break in the late afternoons. The occasional (okay, more than occasional!) late nights are well worth feeling like I usually have time for my clients and my children.

I love summer, but I have to tell you how glad I am that the school vacation part of it is almost over! Besides, fall colors are so pretty, it’s a great season to look forward to. This summer, my multi-tasking abilities were definitely put to the test and my biggest tip for getting everything done: time blocking.

photo credit: wwarby

That’s because while I say I “multi-task”, there are times when too many things going on at once just means you do everything poorly. So I may multi-task when I get a sandwich for the 7 year old, while starting dishes and listening to a story from the 4 year old, I don’t think multi-tasking while actually doing client work is effective.

There are multiple ways to use time-blocking in your work, whether your are a virtual assistant, a lawyer or even a student. I like the suggestions over at Croll Organizing, because it is similar to how I manage my day.  Meredith of Yellow Highlighter VA has a good method as well.

I personally spend time on my email first thing in the am, then I pick a project and spend dedicated time on it. Then I take a Twitter break, then another work project, etc. Of course I also block in time for fun with the kids – today we walked to the park!

I like to use the timer on my stove for measuring time blocks, the kids then know when the buzzer sounds that it is the end of work time for that block and they can have my attention. Doesn’t help much with the toddler yet – but at least the older two get it!

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!

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!!

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.

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!

Do you think the recession is good or bad for work life balance? Obviously some think that the recession will make some lawyers work harder in hopes of avoiding being laid off.  Wow, what a set back that could be for finding true work life balance!

My take is that the recession can be great for giving you some extra time in your day, if that’s what you want. If you know your employer needs to cut costs it might be better to offer to work part-time and lose some of your pay, rather than end up completely unemployed if your employer starts laying people off. Already some companies are speaking with their employees about taking pay-cuts to avoid layoffs (Fed-Ex did it), so why not go that one step further and say here is a way to save money, and we’ll work as hard as we can while we are here, but we want more time off as a benefit of the pay cuts. Maybe you want shorter days, a shorter work week, or even just one extra day off per month. Time is a gift and may be worth the financial cost.

Yes, I definitely think this is a great time for firms to truly embrace part-time and flexible schedules. I left my paralegal position because I wanted and needed more flexibility in my life. For me being an entrepreneur was the right answer, but I had many colleagues who would have given up money for a part-time position. Unfortunately, in every law practice I’ve worked at it was very difficult to work part-time or flex-time. Many claimed to have flexible work arrangements available, but they weren’t easy to access and sometimes meant as little as working 30 minutes less every day so you could go home “earlier”. Let’s hope that one benefit of a recession is a little more appreciation for the people who want it all – careers and time to enjoy their life!

Oh and if you are concerned about work life balance maybe you should check out this conference in Chicago – the Get a Life Conference for attorneys – looks pretty cool!

Becoming a virtual paralegal is the best thing I have ever done, career-wise anyway! So I was very excited when I was interviewed for an article in Legal Assistant Today about the rising trend to being a freelance or virtual paralegal and I just wanted to share, hopefully there will be a link available at Legal Assistant Today at some point in the future, but for now you can read the text of the article by Tammy R. Pettinato here!

Of course, since the article came out I’ve already had a couple of contacts from people who want to become a virtual legal assistant or virtual paralegal. I know there are a ton of people out there, just like I once was, who love what they do but want more flexibility in their scheduling, or who want to get away from the cubicle world and work with their trusty laptops in a coffee-shop, a tropical paradise or (like me!) just want to work in their comfy home offices. While I don’t mind answering the occasional email about becoming a virtual legal assistant, I generally just refer people to the places I got all of my starting info. Check out the VAnetworking Forum or the Virtual Assistant Forums. Both of these places have tons of really helpful information and both are free, so they make the best starting points.

Take care!

I’ve never tried to embed a video on my blog before (I need to do this more often!!) but I was so inspired when I saw this video called The Lost Generation over on Susan Cartier Liebel’s great blog Build A Solo Practice, LLC.  Thank goodness she posted the link on Twitter – I haven’t gotten to my reader in a few days so I don’t know when I would have seen this! You really have to watch this video – the WHOLE thing!! It’s under two minutes and well worth your time!

So what generation are you all from anyway? Does it affect your behaviour, your morals, your desires? Personally I’m at the tail end of Gen X, born in 1975.  I don’t really know how this has affected my life specifically – I tend to think simply of how my family, my upbringing and specific cultural factors have influenced my life and work ethic. I know I’m much like other women of my age – I want a family and a career, I want an equal partnership with my husband and I happily embrace new technology as quickly as I can. Ok, that one seems common here in my blogging and Twittering world but I’m ahead of the curve technologically speaking in my immediate circle of family and friends. Half of them don’t even know what a blog is – shocking as that is to me!!!

I know that all these factors, combined with things like the cost of childcare here in Canada have lead to me choosing the entrepreneurial path. Owning a virtual assistant company and offering my legal assistance services on basically a “freelance” basis allows me to achieve (most days) that elusive balance so many women of my era are seeking. So according to this definition of Generation X, I guess am pretty typical of my generation!

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!!