I coach medical and health writers on how to get hired faster and paid better. One way to save time while increasing writing quality is to create a content outline for every project you work on.
Here is why: You will probably meet other medical writers who don’t create the outline and it’s working for them. All right, but I strongly recommend you create one for every project. An outline helps you to stay on the track. It helps you to provide the perfect time estimation that’s required for a project.
Often time, I hear medical writers complaining that the project took up twice their time and effort and didn’t pay as much. You can beat that by creating an outline, estimating the time based on the outline rather than based on the project brief.
An outline can also help you build an effective portfolio fast. I know many writers who are already in the field for a few year, but haven’t created their portfolio yet. And you, by creating it fast, can beat the competition.
And finally, as a medical writer, your focus has to be both on the research and the communication. Your mind may want to go into the rabbit hole of understanding something super thoroughly before you write the first word, but that’s how you lose the balance. You lose the time.
When you create an outline, you exactly know what’s going to be in the content and how long you need for each piece of content.
And that stops you from going into the rabbit hole.