Emma Raderschadt of infill healthcare communication in Germany looks back on her day in this contribution.
8 am – plan for the day: to get through as many items on the to-do list as possible with as little interruption as possible.
Then what happens…
1. Make a large cup of tea. No tea = very little output possible – a well-known fact for all urologists and English writers.
2. What about breakfast? Not a problem, there are some biscuits here somewhere – possibly even chocolate digestives as a special reward later.
3. Clear emails – or rather those that arrived since I last checked at 11:30 last night. Do wish all clients had the same time zone as us.
4. Deliberately avoid jumping into rather complicated project of completely restructuring a medical information platform. Was working too late last night (3rd night in a row) and still have a bit of waking up to do before that one. Instead plump to correct several self-assessment test questions for an internal learning tool. Much easier and very satisfactory as these can be completed in no time at all.
5. Ting, ting, ting! Oh oh, clients are up and emails are coming in hard and fast. Two approvals, one small change to a website before it goes live, request for help on presentation slides later, and an update from Peter about MedComms Day – Oh, that’s what I wanted to do last night!
6. Problem report from our IT department: the client’s medical information platform (MIP) needs approximately 12 hours to actualise any changes we make to it, so I cannot check anything we did last night until after lunch.
7. More tea, then dive headfirst into the MIP. Now the problem with restructuring something is – you had a logical structure to start with and prepared the texts accordingly. For one year this worked and everyone was happy, but now there is a new director on the team with different ideas. It is not a case of simply shifting the pieces from one section to another, but complete re-editing and as good as my brain is, I can feel it getting slowly addled. Good job the digestives are within reach.
8. Internal project update with partner who has been out of the office for nearly a week interrupts workflow completely, but all good news with 6 new contracts starting soon.
9. Next challenge: explain to German IT programmer in Germish how I want the MPI to look like when finished. Followed by same procedure with German graphic designer. Think that was accomplished rather well.
10. Congratulated myself too soon on language capabilities. Resorted to pointing and making screenshots.
11. Interestingly phrased email from a foreign client on where to put a disclaimer statement on a website (no rude comments, please!). Double and triple checked, again with screenshots just in case, until we managed to reach an agreement.
12. Lunch! Thank goodness for our cook, who produces a warm meal every day for the team.
13. A luxurious 22-minute lunch break – longer than usual.
14. Back to the platform, with a short interlude later to check 5 presentations (somehow the number magically increased from 2) for tomorrow. This turns out to be a 4-hour interlude, as the slides are indescribably detailed (and that’s putting it nicely). The less said the better!
15. Leave the office, collect the kids, bring to football.
16. Proofread the changes to one chapter in a training tool.
17. Proofread a website announcement for publication tomorrow.
18. Check on the presentations for the workshop tomorrow – all completed.
19. More tea, pick up from football.
20. Supper.
21. Then back to complete the MIP work from this afternoon.
22. Later this evening, there will be more tea and then emails before I fall into bed and start again tomorrow.
Can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings. I love this job!!!
