I wrote my last blog post talking about what I do as a medical writer in 2022, and I hadn’t updated my blog for over a year, so I thought this was well overdue. Here’s what a typical day in my life as a medical writer working remotely is like.
7:30AM
I wake up and get my breakfast situated. I always eat oatmeal with blueberries and sliced banana. And a glass of water. I also make an 8oz cup of coffee and add sugar-free Torani vanilla syrup and half and half, and bring that to my desk.
I also typically wash my face in the morning, do a quick skincare routine (toner, serum, moisturizer) and change into a different top – something that looks okay on Zoom calls. Usually, it’s a T-shirt or tank top with a cardigan or hoodie over it. Bottoms are pretty much exclusively sweatpants, yoga pants, or soft shorts.
8:00AM
I’m at my desk at 8:00AM to start my work day. My commute is an easy 22 steps from the kitchen to my desk.
First, I check my email and my Wrike notifications.
Wrike is the project management website that we use at my company. The project manager (PM) assigns all our project duties on Wrike to us as “tasks”, so they’re easy to see.
Each task has hours, deadlines, details, file locations, assignees, etc. all filled out. The tasks are organized in larger project flows so we know who’s working on each task in each project, and who comes before and after us in the workflow.
Email is just email. Usually I don’t have too many unread emails, maybe like 1 or 2.
Then, I get started on whatever I was working on the day before.
What are my typical tasks, you may wonder? Here’s a list of some of the things I do most often (my company makes various types of content for pharmaceutical companies):
- Download and read Prescribing Information for medicines to get information on indication, dosage, mechanism of action, the clinical trials that supported its approval, adverse reactions, etc.
- Do you want to try? Go to any drug’s official website and at the top, you’ll find “Prescribing Information”. Click on that to see the PDF. Here’s a site: https://www.carvykti.com/
- Read Investigator’s Brochures and Pharmacy Manuals for specific drugs or clinical trials that our client sent us and prepare content outlines on Microsoft Word.
- Research regulatory requirements for the U.S., EU, Japan, etc. and compile information in PowerPoint in a way that suits the client’s needs.
- You can learn about how the European Union handles pharmaceutical regulations here: https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/homepage
- Read review papers and U.S.-centric and international treatment guidelines for various diseases that I get assigned projects for. Recently, I’ve worked on melanoma, pancreatic cancer, AML, Alzheimer’s, beta-thalassemia, and endometrial carcinoma. I learn a lot of new stuff every few weeks and I LOVE it.
- I regularly go to this site to read about various cancer treatment guidelines: https://www.nccn.org/guidelines/category_1
- I use the SEER Cancer Stat Facts site (https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/) too, here it is for prostate cancer: https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/prost.html
- Work with our in-house artists and designers to make sure the figures, medical diagrams, and other visual content they create is logical and scientifically accurate. For example, today, I helped a designer properly shade in the different globin proteins in hemoglobin and make sure they were labeled correctly.
- Work with the marketing team to ensure that we are agreeing to client requests in a way that makes sense scientifically and budget-wise. They like to ask us (science people) for input and it’s cool to see the business side of things.
I just work at my desk typing and reading. I might take a break and walk around, pet my cat, make tea, etc., anytime in between.
10:00AM
Team meeting time (on Zoom)!
Unlike lab meetings in my PhD lab where my toxic former PI took 2+ hours to ramble and randomly verbally attack people, the team meetings at my job are 15 minutes or less and very chill.
They usually start off with small talk where people show their pets on camera, talk about travel plans, and other random things. Then, the PM goes through the week’s schedule and what everyone’s working on (I’m at a small company, so no one is anonymous or forgotten). I probably say 1 or 2 sentences every team meeting when it’s my turn. The PM loves to say “Killing it!” to me.
Then, we all get back to work.
12:00PM
I usually leave my desk for an hour to eat lunch and relax at around noon.
I meal prep every weekend so I have my lunches ready to go in the fridge. I’ve been meal prepping for over 5 years now.
My partner (who works hybrid) will take his lunch to work but if he’s working from home, we sometimes eat together. But usually I sit down at the kitchen table again and eat and play on my phone.
I take around a full hour for lunch because of the fact that I legally get a total of 1 hour of break every day, and would rather do it all at once and really relax, rather than breaking it up into chunks and only having like 30 minutes to eat. It’s personal preference though, and as long as you’re chugging away at work and getting things done as tasked, you’re fine doing anything you want when you want and no one at work makes a fuss.
One of my artist coworkers on the east coast has a husky dog and likes to take it to the park for a few hours, eats dinner, then comes back to work after for a couple hours.
The PM and one of the sales guys work out together every Friday morning at like 10:00AM. You can really do whatever you want with your schedule. Everyone is skilled, trusts each other, and gets work done well, whenever they want. That’s freedom and flexibility to me.
I’ll usually make a cup of tea, ice water, or hot water to bring with me back to my desk and then get back to whatever I was working on.
3:30PM
My partner and I always go on a walk at 5:00PM, so I like to have a small snack at around this time. Nongshim shrimp crackers, Quaker white cheddar rice cakes, strawberries, Chobani zero sugar yogurt cups, iced matcha latte, bread, banana, whatever’s on hand.
Usually work gets pretty quiet and starts slowing down at around this time as well. People pick up their kids from school, run some errands before general business hours close, go to weekday appointments, etc. People generally don’t hit me up at this point, which is nice.
I finish up what I planned to finish up and figure out what needs to be done the next day or two.
5:00PM
As soon as the clock hits 5:00PM, I press save, turn off my monitor, and that’s that for the day.
I throw on a jacket and go on an hour-long walk with my partner. It’s nice to have that time to get a few thousand steps in, talk about random things, and also burn some energy. We just walk around the neighborhood.
6:00PM
After the walk, I eat my meal-prepped dinner.
I watch TV while I eat dinner and scroll through my phone as well. My cat likes to make an appearance and sit near me as I eat. Tonight and most nights recently, I watched My Mister.
7:00PM
Today, my partner and I went through our finances because it was the last day of January and we like to see how things went money-wise. We did go on a getaway a few weekends ago but otherwise, finances have been very uneventful. We sat at the kitchen table together with our laptops and went through everything. We both maxed out our Roth IRAs this month so that was a chunk of change. We also max out our 401ks every year, and that is taken out of our paychecks before we get paid.
I recently got a tiny pot and used it to make hot chocolate from scratch, so we had that while we were clicking away on our laptops.
9:00PM
By this time, I’ve showered and I’m either in bed playing phone games, playing with my cat, or doing some other household chores. But it’s bedtime soon, and that’s a day in my life as a remote medical writer.
Life is seriously so calm now; it’s unbelievable how different it is from my very stressful PhD experience.
Please remember that medical writing is like medicine; there are many, many types of medical writing jobs with various job responsibilities. My day in the life is fairly representative of what I do for my job, but is not representative of all medical writing jobs.
Let me know if you want to read about other things related to my job. I’d love to write more blog posts on topics you’re interested in related to grad school, being a medical writer, working remotely, etc.
Remember to check out what I’ve already written using the navigation bar. Thanks for reading!
