In the first post for the “How I Work Smarter” series, I called out one my favorite, accomplished clinician-educators Dr. Victoria Brazil, because she makes extreme-productivity look easy. Victoria was kind enough to provide her trade secrets, and it is with great pleasure that I share her responses to the questions in this series.
In this inaugural post of the series “How I Work Smarter,” I wanted to share my thoughts and efforts towards working smarter and not always necessarily harder. I have been the Editor-in-Chief of ALIEM since 2009 where I first was only managing myself and now I working with an all-star team of very motivated and capable medical educators in EM. Three moving parts rapidly became thirty moving parts with thirty different deadlines. Here are my responses to the series questions.
We are all busy individuals trying to juggle various projects, a multitude of responsibilities, and balancing work and home life. “Work smarter, not harder” is often heard to remind us that we should be looking to improve our working styles to be more efficient. It is easier said than done. One place that I have drawn inspiration from is in LifeHacker’s “How I Work” series, which highlights the personal working habits of successful entrepreneurs and leaders.
We are excited to announce our inaugural 2014-15 ALiEM-EMRA Fellow for Social Media and Digital Scholarship, Scott Kobner, who is a second-year medical student at New York University School of Medicine. Scott brings a unique perspective to ALiEM and the FOAM community. He has worn many hats in the past, which will serve him well towards being a more versatile and mature clinician. He has been an EMT and EMT trainer, a scribe, a child-life volunteer, and New York Free Clinic patient educator. His focus recently has been on improving patient education especially in the Emergency Department.
It is with great pleasure that announce our inaugural 2014-15 ALiEM-CORD Fellow for Social Media and Digital Scholarship, Dr. Sameed Shaikh, from Sinai-Grace Emergency Medicine Residency Program/Detroit Medical Center. As a PGY-2, he already has an impressive multimedia skill set, including website design, video editing, photography, and electronic music composition. He is currently using his skills for good rather than evil at his residency program to match medical education and medicine in general with currently available technological solutions.
We are undergoing some server upgrades before our two fellowships begin on July 1. Let’s all cross our fingers and toes that we can move the 1,000+ posts and database safely over to a faster and more reliable server! Will hopefully be back in a week.
The International Teaching Course, now held twice annually in Baltimore, has a recurring Slide Redesign workshop and competition. Taught by Dr. Stacey Poznanski, this workshop addressed many of the widespread pitfalls which cause “death by powerpoint”. Here are the winners from the workshop competition, illustrating great examples based on Mayer’s multimedia learning theories. The examples below show the before and after slides. Congratulations to the winner, Badria Alhatali, and the close co-runners up, Nadia Awad and Kris Maday!