A Friday in the life of a Copywriter

1.Park yourself on your comfortable chair, in front of your system

2.Read a magazine or a book lying on your inspiring work-desk(the more untidy the table, the better)

3.Log into gtalk, facebook, twitter, youtube, wikipedia, cricinfo, stumbleupon, and the rest

4.Carefully go through all your mailing lists, forwards and the works

5.Sign into your office id, go through your joblist

6.Attend the first briefing session of the day, completely geared up with clip board, paper and pen

7.End the session with, “we’ll get back to you after we’ve thoroughly understood the problem.”

8.Get back to your browsing. Bookmark or note down all the interesting stuff

9.Sit with your creative partner (Art Directors and Copywriters)

10.Discuss the movie you watched last night

11.Decide to discuss the brief over a game of pool or PS2

12.Discuss a great new ad that you watched on youtube

13.Decide to discuss this brief over a cup of coffee

14.Discuss our collective social lives, or the lack of it

15.Decide to discuss the brief in an isolated room (conference room for instance)

16.Discuss your personal lives, and try to figure how different it is from your professional ones

17.Decide to carry on this discussion over lunch

18.Discuss your love lives in brief, or most likely your brief but futile attempts of having one

19.Decide to carry on this discussion over a smoke

20.Discuss the new bar in town, and how you should head there to celebrate a great idea

21.Decide to shoot yourselves in the foot by asking the Creative Director for more time, but put all your feet in your respective mouths instead

22.Decide to work more seriously, and sit with a pile of advertising books

23.Decide to work separately, and start chatting online with greater intensity

24.Read the brief again carefully, and call the Account Executive

25.Give him/her an earful for a brief that had as interesting as the life-cycle of a goldfish

26.Stare at the wall and ceiling, looking for ideas

27.Carefully read some of the product’s technical manual, with a hope of finding ideas

28.Peruse a telephone directory, searching for ideas

29.Read the latest Chacha Choudary, for some inspiration to get the brain cells to work like a 486

30.Draw a few scribbles, write a few lines and go have a look at the Art Director’s progress

31.After shrugging shoulders and patting backs, get back to the system

32.Indulge in favourite creative exercise, coming up with a new FB status message

33.After success in step 32, indulge some more and write a new blog entry

34.Oh Hell, what do you know? It’s dinner time already. So go to the new bar in town to mourn the loss of another Friday night

35.Get back to work

36.Have a serious meeting at 12:30 am, where it is decided that you sleep over the brief

37.Update joblist, and head back home

38.Come to office at 11 am, Saturday morning

39. Repeat step 2-5

40.Encounter the Accounts Executive and remind him that, unlike his job, the creative job is not a postman’s job. Delivery times need more flexibility

41.Repeat step 8-16

42.Finally come up with an idea when repeating step 17

43.Build on the idea while performing step 18-20

44.Head back to the system with new found confidence, and start playing Mafia Wars

45.Write down some copy while revisiting the previous days crossword

46.Sit with Art Director and look for references, while repeating 12-13

47.Art Director works on the layout while you write copy

48.It’s time for dinner, and this time you decide to celebrate a good idea (which may possibly get shot down by your CD, his client, or even his grandmother) with a drink. If you’ve come from Step 51, then it's probably late, so settle for the Pepsi in your office fridge

49. 11pm on a Saturday night, sigh! Get back to business

50. Go back to step 47

51. It's 2 am. Art director gets a new idea. You get excited. Go back to step 46

52. It’s possibly 5 am Sunday morning. You decide to sleep over the brief, but this time, literally

53. 9am, you wake up wondering what just hit you? It’s the Art director who’s finally done. Decide to head back home to enjoy whatever is left of the weekend. And pray that next friday, you can simply perform step 1-5 and end the day with step 37. High Hopes!