Happy New Year, event profs! I hope each of you enjoyed a fruitful and restful holiday season and much-deserved time away from overflowing inboxes and endless to-do lists.
With 2018 fresh upon us, I’m working hard this week to get organized, setting myself up for success this year by implementing tools and tips to stay on track. Here are three tools I can’t live without.
1. Day Designer Each Christmas, I count on one gift under the tree from my husband—my beloved Day Designer. This strategic planner is way more than a typical agenda book, and I couldn’t live without it. In addition to full daily pages that allow me to plan out my to-do list by the hour (and outline my top three priorities each day), it features a life planning section at the beginning to help you set goals and intentions for the year. Organization, accountability and provocative, deep thinking about what it will take to be successful? Check, check and check.
2. Google Suite I couldn’t live without the Google Calendar feature, which I use to meticulously schedule every interview, event, deadline, flight and appointment, plus remember important events like birthdays. I recently downloaded the updated Google Calendar app to my phone, and it’s now an essential for me. Along with Calendar, keeping organized via folders on each of my Gmail accounts is crucial. I label everything with care and create subfolders within folders to help me file all important emails appropriately. The Boomerang app for Chrome is another tool I use to help me stay organized with emails, as it allows you to schedule an email to return to your inbox at a future date, or preschedule an email to send in the future.
3. Evernote I’d heard event tech evangelist Dahlia El Gazzar sing the praises of this organizational app for years at conferences, but I’d always been skeptical. Was it really going to be better than my endless notebooks and Post-Its filled with reminders to myself? The short answer: yes. After my friend Selvis Morales of Devil’s in the Details event planning studio showed me how Evernote worked last fall, I finally downloaded it. All I can say now is, do it! This app has been a gamechanger for me, helping me to record all the ideas that come to me while laying in bed or sitting on the train, and automatically syncing to my laptop to put into action later.
What tools are you using to stay organized in 2018? I’d love to know your favorite apps, tools and tricks to keeping yourself accountable. Share with me in the comments or on Twitter.
