Become More Efficient and Consistent: Create Comprehensive Checklists for Your Medical Communication Tasks

Fall is a busy time of year, starting with the back-to-school rush and ending with the holidays and the new year. This season of change can be a great time to re-evaluate what’s working well as a medical communicator, whether as a freelancer or employee.

Many successful medical communicators get things done by being organized and creating good systems. One way to do this is to create comprehensive checklists. These lists combine the steps of a task from start to finish (like a standard operating procedure, or SOP) with all the little details that writers and editors need to remember. Such comprehensive checklists help people manage tasks by focusing only on what is needed for the task at hand. 

Comprehensive checklists can help medical writers with many tasks, such as researching, outlining, drafting, writing, revising, self-editing, fact-checking, and managing review cycles. In fact, a single writing project may benefit from multiple checklists: one overarching checklist that outlines the project's main activities, supported by more detailed checklists for the individual tasks within each activity. These checklists can help medical writers keep track of milestones by serving as a record of what’s been done, what still needs to be done, and the deadlines for deliverables. 

Medical editors may also benefit from using checklists. Such checklists may include style details that may ordinarily be on a style sheet, process steps that may ordinarily be on longer SOPs or instruction documents, and time-tracking details that may help editors keep metrics of their work. With all the steps in one place, it is easier to get into a consistent rhythm, allowing editors to track their progress and step in and out of a task without losing their place. 

Comprehensive checklists can also be helpful for business tasks, such as onboarding a new client, contractor, or employee, or completing financial and marketing tasks. Many freelance medical communicators without a business background or much interest in the business side of freelancing often struggle with these tasks; it’s not why they got into medical communications. Having a checklist to motivate them to complete some of the relatively less interesting parts of freelancing can be a real advantage. 

For financial tasks, creating a Financial Friday checklist can motivate a freelancer to send out invoices, follow up on unpaid invoices, and pay bills associated with the business. Freelancers who struggle with marketing can create and use a checklist that outlines a manageable list of activities for that day or week while tracking what’s doing well and what’s not constructive. Being accountable to the checklist, feeling a sense of achievement by checking tasks off the list, and knowing that some action has been taken can make a big difference in how the freelancer feels about their marketing efforts and may encourage them to continue to take the small, consistent steps needed to market themselves. This process feels much better than feeling a sense of dread or overwhelm and consequently doing nothing. 

For these and many other tasks, documenting all the steps, by creating comprehensive checklists, is a good way to show just how much effort goes into the work. By analyzing how to do a task more efficiently, medical communicators can optimize their time and complete tasks more consistently.

Saving time can be as important as saving money, and having peace of mind can be priceless. 

About the author: Kelly Schrank, MA, ELS, has been a technical writer/editor for 30 years, a medical editor in the pharmaceutical industry for 15 years, and a lover of checklists for as long as she can remember. She is a BELS-certified Editor in the Life Sciences and the author of the book Clarity by Design: Comprehensive Checklists in Medical Communication. Kelly has presented on checklists, editing, Microsoft products, data visualization, infographics, and networking in webinars and at conferences. Free editing and writing checklists, including Financial Friday and Marketing Monday checklists, are on her website: https://headbookworm.com/checklist-examples.