One of the best things about working as a virtual paralegal is that I get to work with really interesting people from all over Canada, the United States and even people who live in Europe! I have one client that is in the UK and I have people I occasionally need to liaise with contacts for my clients in some pretty far flung locations. This can be really cool, BUT there is a caveat. It can be pretty challenging to work across multiple time...

Some days you just feel unmotivated and uninspired. Time for an inspiring quote: Work is love made visible. And if you can’t work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of the people who work with joy. -Kahlil Gibran  

Wishing a wonderful 2012 to all my clients, colleagues and blog readers! I’m looking forward to a great 2012. 2011 was truly a successful year for Halo Secretarial Services, with several new clients and an increased dedication to taking on only lawyer clients, to allow me to truly practice my specialty of legal virtual assistance. I initiated working with my first subcontractor (a fabulous VLA based locally in Alberta), started using a...

Working from home allows me a lot of flexibility in the summer – I work in the mornings and often take the mid-late afternoon off to hit a park with the kids, go on a bike ride or just veg in the swing in the backyard. But working for myself has meant I don’t take a lot of extended time off from working. Last summer I took a week to travel to BC with my husband and kids, but I took my laptop along and spent time on the drive and...

I definitely sit too much during the day. I sit at my desk, I sit in my car, I sit and I sit and I sit. Recently I began adding in regular exercise to my week (training for a triathlon!) but still I know that all those hours of sitting are hard to balance out without a lot of activity. Then last weekend I read about treadmill desks (actually I read about them before, but never actually READ the articles, just glanced and moved on with my day)....

I can! When I first started operating Halo Secretarial, I realized how critical a proper backup system was going to be. I owned an external hard drive and was in the habit of using it semi-regularly to backup important information, but found it to be a time consuming process and was worried it wasn’t reliable enough by itself. A lot of research led me to believe that my best choice would be a backup and syncing setup, as I have two...