Top 9 Essential Apps for event planners to increase productivity

If a magical genie granted me three wishes, what would I wish for? Any guesses?

Let me tell you that my first wish would be to have the power to control time because being an event professional what we always need is more and more time to achieve our deadlines. Then my second wish would be to get the power of multitasking as this word is synonymous with event planning. And last but not least my third wish would be to get some magical tools to boost my productivity.

Uhh! Neither I am Aladdin from Arabian Nights nor I have a magical genie to grant me even a single wish.

But what if I say I have a magical genie and not only me even you have a magical genie and that is in your hand right now.

Yes, You guessed that right. In 2020, our magical genie is our smartphone who can be our assistant even and the best thing about it is that it has millions of wishes to grant us and make our life easy in seconds. Those wishes are in the form of smartphone applications.

The list of the best productivity apps of 2020 is endless. There is an app for almost every task we perform in our everyday life. But we don’t need all of them. So here I am going to run you through my pick of the

 Top 9 essentials apps that can help you to boost your productivity

Before going through the list must note that I am featuring those apps here which can only help increase your productivity at work or simplify the day to day jobs of an event planner. But if you are looking for apps or software to help you manage a large scale event that requires you to host hundred or more attendees, their seating arrangements, invitations, ticketing, and more, then sorry these apps will not fulfill your needs. There is professional software that can help you with that.

Here is the list of top mobile apps of 2020 that I am using to boost my productivity

1. Evernote

We, event planners, are always been surrounded by ideas and information. As we are known for our creative bent of mind, multiple creative ideas keep popping up in our heads. It is not easy for us to recall those ideas at any time when we desperately need them. Whether some idea occurs to you at any moment in the day, or you need to brainstorm and organize your thoughts, or clip and save some information from a web page or ebook, Evernote makes all these tasks seamless.

I spend 20% of the time in this app on my desktop and 80% on my phone. The ease of being able to use either makes it very appealing. So, I recommend Evernote to anyone who needs to document and organize information. Evernote is great for audio, handwriting, and everything in between. The application works well on any android phone as well as on Windows 10 and Apple iOS. I have used the free version for years. There is also a subscription version with more features (In my personal experience, a free version is more than enough).

2. Pinterest

I am always in the quest for creative inspiration not only for my work but for my personal life too. Sometimes I am looking for trending hairstyles or eye-catchy tattoos for my makeover. And most of the time I am in search of out-of-the-box ideas for my future event theme designing and after doing all my google searches where I ended up landing is Pinterest.

I love that I can find step by step instructions on how to do just about anything. There are beautiful pictures that motivate me to try new things and so many ideas home decoration, event planning related stuff & discover billions of possibilities for every part of your life. You can save pins/pictures into groups you create and allows you to share your own.

When it comes to getting event inspirations and ideas from the internet, I prefer to check out some of the best event management blogs to stay updated with the latest trends of the event industry. 

Must check out our pick of  Top 15 Event Management Blogs Every Event Professionals Should Read in 2020

3. Canva

I never have to worried about anything related to basic graphic designing and visual presentations because Canva is always there on my phone to make my life easy. If you are an event planner or from any creative background. Canva is a boon for those who are unskilled in the magic of graphic design. It is easy to use thanks to its very inbuilt drag-and-drop interface. There are a ton of templates you can choose from to work with multiple categories. These include infographics, posters, and even all your social media posts templates. You can easily customize those templates as per your need and taste.

P.S I design almost all my social media posts and blog banners on Canva only.

4. Google Drive

There is a problem that almost every event planner faces a day or another that is getting a warning of storage full on their mobile phones. Even after getting 256 GB of storage on our smartphone, we can’t be satisfied. And it’s not only about the storage but also about collaboration and accessing our saved data from anywhere. The solution to all these problems is a cloud-based storage system only.

And Google Drive is one of the most reliable and secured cloud-based storage software. Any files you drag into your Google Drive folder remain stored on your hard drive by default but also get replicated in the cloud. From the cloud, these files also get sent to other devices that you’ve connected to your Google Drive cloud storage. Google Drive has been an invaluable resource for my professional career. It allows me to securely store, access, and share documents, photos, spreadsheets, videos reliably, quickly, and from anywhere in the world.

5. Microsoft Office Lens

As per the Google Play store, Microsoft Office lens is named one of the “Best Apps of 2015” in the U.S and Puerto Rico. This app is extremely helpful, especially when you don’t have a scanner available. And we event planners always need to scan some documents like vendor forms, event blueprints or checklist, and many more like that. In such cases when we are not accessible to any scanner we have the only option is to click a snap of that document through our mobile camera and that is a lengthy task to do.

In such cases, I prefer the Microsoft Office lens app as it saves me a ton of time when I need to scan documents. It’s faster than using a classical scanner and depending on the number of sheets, in some cases it is even faster than an automated copy machine. A great app to convert your documents into pdf at one go. It has many different options to change appearance, such as black and white, greyscale, etc. It has helped me a lot with converting my documents into pdf. The best part is no advertising, no stamp on files created by the app.

6. Hootsuite

If you are an entrepreneur or someone single handily planning to organize an event. Then there are so many tasks you are supposed to do and event marketing is one of them. If you depending upon ticketing or even inviting guests to attend your event. You have to focus a lot on marketing the event like going to every individual target audience and ask them to attend your event.

But tech and social media upgrades have opened the door to new ways to connect online. From live-tweeting to live streaming, businesses and organizations are staging virtual events across the web. And so we need to get digital.

Hootsuite can work as a virtual social media manager for your event and organization. It can help you to promote your virtual events on social media and connect with attendees. Schedule all of your social media posts, engage with followers and measure performance from one dashboard.

P.S. I schedule all my eventshala social media posts on Hootsuite and it does wonders for me to see every post engagements in no time.

7. Grammarly

Many a time we are in a hurry to complete our one task so that we can switch to another one and we termed it as multitasking but in reality, that is not multitasking but just task switching which decreases our productivity.

Writing something like a mail to client or event brief for the team members is sometimes a tough task for event planners especially when you have some more important tasks to do. But even we always want to make sure our writing is error-free and easy to read so that we can save ourselves from a grammar nazi or pseudo-intellectuals who are always sitting out there to criticize our work. At that what we desperately need is a proofreader who just makes our writing error-free. But you cant keep him always with your self.

And here comes another best productivity app that every event planner must have in their phone i.e Grammarly.

Grammarly is a writing tool that helps you check for several types of errors. It detects grammar and punctuation mistakes from basics to advanced. It helps you avoid embarrassing typo and grammatical errors. Both free and premium versions are best to use. It all depends upon you what kind of writing you are doing. It works wherever you are: they have desktop apps along with a Grammarly extension for your web browser.

The company offers you a specialized Grammarly keyboard for mobile devices so you can apply the tool to your writing on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Gmail, and other web pages and web pages and platforms you type on. I use Grammarly Keyboard as it works very conveniently like Gboard and also helps me to avoid writing errors by proofreading every single line.

8. Inshorts

Inshorts is a news app that provides hand-curated short, crisp, and relevant news within 60 words. In a world where every information is best received when it’s crisp and short, Inshorts is all about “Knowing it all without reading it all”.

It is another best smartphone app for an event planner to use as we are always so much occupied in our job that we hardly find time to connect with the external worlds and get updated with the things happening globally. Inshorts is a medium of quick content consumption and simple user-friendly interface and that’s why it outshines other similar applications out there in the market. It says in shorts and the name justifies the behavior of the app.

I use this app to stay in touch with the current affairs be it national or international. The short headlines are descriptive enough and if you need a little bit more details it also presents a beautiful, informative yet brief summary. All in all, a must-have app for everybody.

I believe you have not missed one of the important news of the Indian event industry that EEMA has appointed Roshan Abbas as the new president in 2020, Yahoo! we have got that news covered 

EEMA welcomes Roshan Abbas as new president in 2020

9. WPS Office

Last but not least, Maybe as per my list of best productivity apps of 2020 it finds the place in 9th position but it is no way less effective than all the other apps in the list.

As per Google Play, WPS Office has several features as mentioned below.

All-in-one Complete Free Office Suite App
• Integrate with Memo, Document, Sheet, Presentation and PDF
• High compatibility with Microsoft Office( Word, PowerPoint, Excel ), Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, Adobe PDF, OpenOffice and Polaris Office.

Connect to Cloud Drive
• Automatically save documents as cloud file: Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote and OneDrive. Cloud documents are always safe in your WPS cloud office.

Easy to Share and Transfer Documents
• Easy to share office documents via WIFI, NFC, DLNA, Email, Instant Messaging, Whatsapp, Telegram, Facebook and Twitter.

I used it as the best substitute for MS Office suite as most of the MS Office mobile-based applications are too heavy in size. So WPS Office is always my first choice for mobile phones.

I believe you may find all these best smartphone-based productivity apps helpful for you also.

So that’s my pick of the best productivity apps which I use to get my work done effectively and efficiently all the time. As I always say, I only recommend what I find useful for myself and have a personal experience of using that product or services. Now, it’s over to you to try out the apps you think have something to offer and find the toolkit that works for you.

Also, comment below about some other best smartphone apps if you are using that helped you to boost your productivity in the event planning. And do let me know if you want me to write about event management software which can help you to plan a whole event.

Wiz Bunny

Wiz Bunny is a creative wizard who is an Event Enthusiast and a Passionate Blogger. A Hustler who always finds a way to gets what he believes in. He loves to guide people who are willing to start their career in event management. Through his blog posts, he always tries to mentor aspiring event professionals to achieve their goals in life.