How caffeine fuels a 12-hour working day

The day is punctuated with strong cups of coffee. A 12-hour day is the norm in this industry - some of my colleagues don't actually make it home every evening, and every second weekend I would be working. I have my own office at home in Surrey, which is completely self-contained. Clients could come by and notrealise there is a home attached.

I'm married, with a four-year-old and 18-month-old twins. When I'm at work, they know I'm not to be disturbed, and I've built myself a soundproof door to ensure that! Of course, at 18 months you don't always get it, so they might toddle by now and again.

My work has always involved a lot of travel and the way I'm working at the moment is the best system I've had so far in terms of seeing my family. When I'm commuting a lot I have to get up before the kids, and I get home after they've gone to bed. This way, the days I'm home I see the kids at brekky time and tuck them up when they're going to bed. Then my wife is quite happy to get rid of me for three days and I get to hang out with the lads.

When I'm in Dublin I get into the office before 8 a.m. - first cup of coffee. Then I'd have something like a strategy meeting, to talk about how projects are coming along. I'm the strategist and I want to know if the strategy has worked. Around 9 or 9.30 a.m., next cup of coffee. For the rest of the morning I'd drink coffee and work on a solution for a client - what we call a scope.

The scope is the document for the client which outlines the solution regarding the product they want to communicate, using multimedia. I would write up about two a week, both at around 4,000 words a piece. I tend to have between 11 and 14 scopes on the go at any one time. When I come up with an idea I run it past the art director and the technical director. I don't work in isolation, coming up with the idea, but I have to communicate the idea to the client and the others on the team myself.

I have to come up with something which is the right approach visually, right for the client, and right technically. As part of the solution, we have to ensure the interactive design of the product enhances the brand. The brand is what people associate with the product. If we're doing a school pack, I have to ensure the constituent parts all gel together. The pack has to work for the teacher and, in a very different way, for the students. Part of my job is to talk to teachers about what they could use in the classroom, and to discuss with 15-year-olds what they'd find challenging. We would bring 15-year-olds in to look at the mock up of an education pack, and it is my job to suss out what the teenagers like - and to explain that to 30-year-olds who'll produce it.

Lunchtime is a working lunch. And more coffee. I would tend to have lunch with a client, or maybe there would be an internal meeting. I'll have another coffee when I get back to the office and spend the rest of the evening doing people-to-people work. I sit down and work with our experts - the interactive design experts, development and programming experts, the project co-ordinators.

I am also responsible for drawing up budgets. Depending on the complexity of the solution, you'll have a different budget.

The last couple of hours of the evening would be taken up with writing scopes. At around 8 p.m., I'd head down the pub with some colleagues, and at that stage we would usually discuss the wider picture - as in the future of the company.

I suppose the worst part about the job is the hours - it's hard work. But I see it as a vocation, I've always wanted to be involved in high-tech media production - it's what I've done for the last 20 years.

To unwind, I try to go coarse fishing every weekend. I sit there drinking whiskey, watching the lake and staring at the clouds.

In an interview with Jackie Bourke