Holiday Gift Guide for ALiEM Readers: Top 5 Favorite Tech Tools

Technology continues to integrate with our life — for better and worse. Our team felt that the following 5 tech tools added value and joy to our lives, and so we are sharing with you. These also make great gifts for the emergency physician or healthcare provider in your life this holiday season.

Blinkist is a professional book summary subscription service that condenses key points from non-fiction books into 15-minute reads. This is an efficient way to catch with all those books that you have been putting off.

The Headspace app is one of the frequently used mindfulness app in the world. Working in Emergency Medicine was already extremely stressful before the pandemic began. Being more intentional about self-care is as critical as ever for our personal and professional well-being.

Noise-cancelling headphones, such as the Anker Soundcore Life Q20 Noise Canceling Headphones are essential, especially if need some quality time working alone or just need some “me time”. With potentially many people in our house conducting virtual meetings, doing work, and performing chores, this over-the-ear headphone does the trick.

The Anker Soundcore Bluetooth Speaker is a compact, quality wireless speaker that you can take with you to your favorite “office” (such as your backyard), on your night shift to boost team morale, or play in the background for your patients as you are suturing their lacerations.

Reincubate’s Camo is a software that turns your iPhone into your computer’s webcam. Without needing to buy fancy videocamera equipment, you can upgrade your videoconferencing and video recordings by using your iPhone’s high-resolution camera. While the free version provides 720p video resolution, Camo Pro allows for 1080p resolution, portrait mode, and manual control of the camera features. Note: Nonprofits and educators can contact them for a discount off of the $39.99 annual subscription.

Check out our other holiday gift lists:

Disclosure: Although we do not have an official partnership with Amazon, we belong to their Amazon Affiliates program which allows us to be paid a few pennies with books purchased from our links.

Holiday Gift Guide for ALiEM Readers: Top 7 Favorite Books

With the holiday season rapidly approaching, we polled the ALiEM team on favorite books to buy for yourself or a fellow healthcare provider. Many of us try to make time to read in our busy schedules to learn, be entertained, understand, process, and grow. As Truman stated, “Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” View our top 7 recommendations below.

1. Tricks of the Trade in Emergency Medicine

We are biased, but we believe that the Tricks of the Trade book would make a lovely coffee table gift for you or your colleague. The hardbound, color print book concisely describes 50 tricks, applicable in one’s Emergency Department practice. Bonus: All proceeds go to help support the ALiEM team continue to teach.

2. Steal Like an Artist

We are fans of Austin Kleon, who publishes uniquely creative (and short) books about creativity. Steal Like an Artist is a perennial favorite as a graduation gift for emergency medicine residents as well.

3. Keep Going

Although Keep Going seems to be a lesser known work compared to Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon, many of our team members actually like this book more. The subtitle is “10 ways to stay creative in good times and bad.” With the pandemic throwing a wrench in everyone’s personal and professional lives, his tips and examples especially spoke to us.

4. How Stella Saved the Farm

Although How Stella Saved the Farm seems a simple parable about a farm in trouble, it has resonated across various sectors and organizations to teach about the mindset of innovation. Leading change initiatives are fraught with obstacles and conflicts, but can be predicted based on the 8 lessons provided.

5. Digital Minimalism

During the pandemic, it has been tempting to be consumed within digital tools and platforms. Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism book is like the Marie Kondo guide for your digital technology life so that you are more intentional and how you spend your time.

6. Big Potential

Emergency physicians are no strangers to the “we over me” movement. But have you ever wondered just how to convince everyone around you that we can be greater than the sum of our parts? The book Big Potential uses some of the author’s advanced research in happiness and team dynamics to help offer a way forward for your team or organization and to reframe what makes us happy and just how grand it could all be.

7. The Splendid and the Vile

Ever feel like we have been stuck inside for ages, with danger lurking just outside your door? Two years into the pandemic, and it can feel like the world is ending. However, we are not alone, and people have been through similar experiences before (most notably the Blitz of London). This book, Splendid and the Vile, offers a strung-together narrative from first-hand accounts of that experience as only Erik Larson can.

Check out our other holiday gift lists (coming soon):

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Top 7 Favorite Tech Tools