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This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here. Recently, I shared the tools that power my mornings. Now let’s explore what I rely on from lunch to bedtime. Below youll see sites, apps, and gadgets that carry me from noon to night. From a niche workshop platform to my quirky ‘invisible’ clock, these are the tech companions that help me wrap up a fruitful day. 2 p.m.: Lunch and thinking break I often abandon screens for my midday pause. Other times I use apps like these: Healthy Minds: Short audio pieces help guide me through mindfulness practices. I like the 5-10 minute active lessons that work well for a walking meditation. The app is free and well designed. If Im feeling anxious, I sometimes use the Headspace meditation app, which I also use for focus music when working. Libby: is my beloved source of free library audiobooks. I listen when Im walking to lunch or commuting. Resy and OpenTable: Handy for quick lunch reservations. Too Good To Go: Its fun to try heavily discounted local restaurant food, though the quality varies. I used MealPal for a while for local lunch deals when I wasnt as often bringing lunch from home. The Infatuation: Helpful lists of tasty new local restaurants. 1 to 3 p.m.: Preparing to teach After lunch, I develop teaching plans, prepare to lead workshops, or work on other school-related projects for my job as Director of Teaching and Learning at the CUNY Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. Craft: My go-to for creating visually engaging digital handouts. Its easy to use and works wonderfully on mobile or desktop. [Why Craft is so useful.] Text Blaze: When Im typing a lot, keyboard shortcuts help. I use snippets for signatures, AI prompts, addresses, and commonly typed phrases. Raycast also works well for these shortcuts. Tangible notes: I like writing notes away from my laptop periodically to get my eyes off the screen and to change my brain mode. I alternate between: I use a Rocketbook reusable notebook for lists and reminders. A $20 VersaTiles memo board is great for jotting passing thoughts. A giant whiteboard helps me draw connections. My reMarkable Paper Pro tablet hosts notes I will return to repeatedly. Arc Browser: I create custom spaces for specific classes or projects, with bookmarks and account settings tailored to that context. Kahoot, Padlet, and Slido: I rely on this trio of teaching tools to power activities that promote active learning in classes or workshopsrather than passive listening. Here are more of my favorite apps for teaching. Protecting my afternoon focus Raycast Focus Mode: Blocks email and distractions during short, focused, deep work sprints. Time Out: I set this app to remind me to give my eyes a screen break every 15 minutes. It pulses over the screen to nudge me to look out the window. Paper book: I sometimes take a short midafternoon reading break to relax, breathe, recharge my brain, and detach from my screen. Heres the book stack Im dipping into this month, reflecting a mix of my interests. 3 to 5 p.m.: Meetings I try to schedule meetings for late afternoon. When theyre fruitful, its great to conclude the day with collaboration. Granola: My favorite new app for transcribing and summarizing meetings. Its three best features: 1. Since it records locally on my laptop, theres no awkward bot joining the Zoom. 2. I can incorporate my own notes during the meeting, which get blended into the AI-powered summary. 3. Granola can draft helpful follow-up emails or Slack messages, or I can query it afterward about a meeting topic. Butter: My favorite tool for leading live online workshops, including live demos for Wonder Tools paid subscribers. Its thoughtfully designed for facilitators and teachers. It lets me easily incorporate interactive elements, from polls to collaborative brainstorming. If a meeting has to be hosted on Zoom or another platform, I can use Butter Scenes for interaction. Camera tools: Camo lets me modify my camera to zoom in, adjust lighting, or add an overlay during video calls. Prezi Video and Mmhmm enable lower-thirds, annotations, and overlay visuals I occasionally use for presentations. Sony UX570 voice recorder is my reliable $80 hardware backup for recording audio. I like that it doesn’t require an open laptop or running phone. I often transcribe the audio files with MacWhisper. 6 p.m.: After work Evening and nghttime tools help with relaxation, family time, and better sleep: Snipd: This smart podcast app lets me triple-tap my AirPods to save highlights to Readwise, which syncs to my digital notebook. (Recent favorite: Shell Game by Evan Ratliff. Season 1 is terrific, about AI voice clones.) Nex: I love playing the sports and workout games on this family video game system. Theyre all active games played with your body, not your thumbs, and theres no violence. I play solo or with my wife and daughters. Its like a next-generation Nintendo Wii, which we also still playespecially tennis, skiing, and the Wii Fit balance games. We also enjoy these family tabletop games. 11 p.m.: Bedtime Glocusent rechargeable reading light: This little $13 light clips onto any book or magazine for nighttime reading. One battery charge lasts for months. Yogasleep Dohm white noise machine: This $50 gadget masks random night sounds in noisy New York City, making it easier to sleep. Sony Noise Cancelling Headphones: I bought my WH-1000XM3 pair seven years ago, and still rely on them for listening to music before bed and focus sounds while working. Im planning to buy a new XM6 model when theyre released this summer. Peakeep invisible alarm clock: I turn off the display on this $12 bedside clock so its hidden at night. I can tap the top to see the time if I need to. I mainly use it for its gentle morning alarm, so I can keep my tempting phone out of my bedroom. This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here.
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E-Commerce
The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. At the Exceptional Women Alliance, we enable high-level women to mentor each other to achieve personal and professional happiness through sisterhood. As the nonprofit organizations founder, chair, and CEO, I am honored to interview and share insights from thought leaders who are part of our peer-to-peer mentoring program. This month, Im pleased to introduce Roslyn Schneider, MD, a physician, and driver of person centeredness in healthcare, medical education, and the biopharmaceutical industry. She has practiced medicine as a pulmonologist, launched blockbuster medicines while at biopharmaceutical companies, and worked with companies and coalitions to embed patient and community involvement across the medical product development and commercialization lifecycle. Here is some of what we talked about. Q: What inspired you to focus on human-centered design in healthcare, research, and medical product development? Roslyn Schneider, MD: My personal and family encounters with our healthcare system, clinical practice during the height of the AIDS epidemic, and seeing the value of partnerships with patients as lived experience experts, have been my greatest influences. As a child I was misdiagnosed, in large part, because physicians dismissed concerns from my parents who were immigrants with little formal education, but who knew there was something wrong. As an adult, I practiced and taught at a New York City hospital in the 1980s and 90s when we had limited treatments for HIV infection. People who were in the prime of their lives were dying, battling a poorly understood, devastating illness, and the community challenged the pace of medication development and access. I saw the power of their advocacy and activism with businesses, health authorities, and researchers, at the intersection with medical practice and science. That power resulted in transformation of a uniformly fatal illness, to a chronic illness in much of the world today, and it forever changed how medical products are developed, approved, and accessed. These experiences were front and center for me, as my teams have partnered with patients and patient organizations in an intentional, iterative manner, from the early stages of development and at key points in its lifecycle, for as long as a particular product is available. Q: What’s the role of physician and community engagement in precision medicine? Schneider: During my four decades since graduating medical school, medicine has become increasingly precise. Deliberately engaging with patients who are lived experience experts, will help us ensure that these treatments are not only precise, but personal. Precision therapies, whether in clinical trials or commercially available, are specifically aimed toward genetic or other targets. We must be careful not to fall so in love with the science, that we dont consider how participation in the clinical research or use of these products may or may not fit with peoples health goals and life goals. Maintaining community relationships, active listening to understand care gaps and preferences, co-creation, and prioritizing outcomes that matter most to patients are critical as we develop all types of medicines and medical technologies. Q: You’ve been a leader in and a consultant for small, medium, and large-sized global companies. Where is the industry compared to its patient-centric goals, and what might we expect in the next decade? Schneider: Its tempting to be satisfied with how much more patient engagement there is in medical product development now compared with earlier days, but we are not yet where we need to be. In periods of resource constraints and economic pressures, companies might, shortsightedly, consider reducing their engagement with patients as partners to achieve savings. Theres a regression of thinking that this is somehow non-essential to successful outcomes for patients and for businesses. That happens despite the financial models of the value of patient engagement, and many real-life examples of shortened business timelines, reduction of costly, avoidable amendments to clinical research protocols, and more favorable product labeling, and more effective patient support programs. Data from the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development are consistent with what I hear from professionals and patients in relevant working groups I participate in. Data show that most companies today are piloting or sometimes implementing patient-centered elements in clinical development, yet the minority are doing so routinely. Patients are waiting is an outdated slogan. I have confidence that lived experience experts and professionals across the globe will continue to find innovative ways to embed patient engagement into standard processes and utilize metrics that will resonate with stakeholders and decision makers at the grassroots level, the executive suite, and in the boardroom. Larraine Segil is founder, chair, and CEO ofThe Exceptional Women Alliance.
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E-Commerce
The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. Have you ever wanted to break up with your doctornot because of the practitioner, but because of the difficulty in engaging with their practice? Youre not alone. Ive left doctors for that reason and McKinsey has found that nearly 25% of consumers have delayed care because they hate everything about the process. System complexity is not doctors fault, but making the care experience easier for patients is now theirand their teamsburden. And that burden is only increasing. With generative AI reaching a tipping point, practices that cant adopt the technology to engage patients with a consumer-grade experience will soon face an existential crisis. In virtually every other aspect of our livesfrom banking and shopping to transportation and vacation planningtechnology has dramatically improved the consumer experience, catering to convenience and access. But not in healthcare, where the experience of being a patient still differs widely from practice to practice. There are offices where booking a routine medical appointment can feel more stressful than booking a flight to Melbourne or negotiating insurance approval for a standard treatment feels out of reach. While healthcares digital revolution has stubbornly lagged other industries, that is now shifting. Patients are beginning to flex their consumer muscles, demanding digital convenience that enhances human connection. And theyre increasingly starting to vote with their feet when they dont get the digital attention they need. We see this with the uptick in patients turning to urgent care clinics for more than just colds, because of the flexibility and digital access they provide. At the same time, much of the technology aimed at improving patient experience has, so far, created more work for doctors. These compounding factors are pushing an already burdened ecosystem towards its limits. But there is a way forward. And it’s based on understanding that the ability to deliver a consumer-grade patient experience requires a better practice experience, one where physicians and administrators alike can spend their time on what matters most: delivering patient care. An AI aha moment Until recently, many physicians have struggled to realize the value of AI in their practice. The introduction of ambient listening technology has changed the equation, creating an industry-wide revelation. This AI-based voice recognition technology has quickly proven its ability to shave off hours of time on notetaking, documentation, and entering preliminary information to assist in billing patient encounters. Doctors who were previously plagued by pajama timehours spent catching up on patient documentation work at homefeel liberated by AI-powered ambient listening. And the research supports that the optimism is more than anecdotal. athenahealths annual Physician Sentiment Survey found a positive shift in physicians opinions of AI. This year, only 27% of surveyed physicians believe AI to be overhyped or unable to meet expectations (down from 40% a year ago), and the majority of physicians who previously reported using AI in their practice (68%) are using it more frequently to generate clinical documentation. Beyond the important work to streamline operations, AI is also increasingly working as an intelligence layer that enables doctors to spend less time hunting for facts and more time acting on insights at the moment of care, allowing their practices to offer a better experience for patients and staff. The rise of AI agents What am I excited about seeing in 2025? AI applications on the horizon that can deliver on the promise of a more consumer-friendly, human experienceone that shifts physicians attention away from the computer screen and back toward their patients. Recently, I was at the HIMSS conference, an annual gathering of healthcare technology leaders. While last years conference centered on generative AI hype, with few applications in sight, this year showed real world impact and a more tangible roadmap of coming applicationsincluding agentic AI. AI agents have been operating behind the scenes in many industries for years, but large language models are giving them the ability to perform more complex tasks, such as answering certain patient questions and managing front office work. We are already seeing these agentic AI applications in our app store Marketplace of partner tools (for instance Salesforces Agentforce for Health), and are exploring agentic AI throughout our solutions, such as in improving the revenue cycle management process. As the technology enables practices to function more efficiently, those improvements will be felt by their patients, whose needs can be met faster and more directly. The benefits are real As a health tech marketer and executive, I understand both the challenge and the opportunity ahead. As I wrote about AI previously in Fast Company: Just as important as building and evolving the technology is our ability to market AIs benefits to physicians and patients alike, to ensure that its leveraged to help reclaim whats at the heart of exceptional care: a meaningful patient-physician relationship. I believe the recent AI advances have demonstrated that the benefits are real. That we, as patients, can finally stop checking our consumer expectations at the door of our doctors office. And that better care is within our reachnot despite technology, but because of it. Stacy Simpson is chief marketing officer of athenahealth.
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E-Commerce
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