Nobody tells first-year PhD students that half the job is calendar management. You show up dreaming of breakthroughs and discover that breakthroughs have deadlines, and the deadlines don't care about your dreams.
Start with the basics, which are free. A conference deadline tracker app, iOS or Android, with alerts set thirty days and fourteen days out. A mobile app for academic submission deadlines is the cheapest productivity upgrade in grad school, and it costs nothing, which is good, because you have nothing. Set the alerts the day you learn a conference exists, not the week you plan to write. Future you is busy. Future you is always busy.
Next, learn where venues come from. Your references are a map. Your advisor is a guide. A venue matcher SaaS is the compass for everything the other two miss. An academic venue finder that covers your discipline will surface workshops and second-tier conferences your advisor forgot to mention. Some of the best PhD publications happen at venues the famous labs ignore. Remember that.
Finally, respect the submission portal. Before you upload, run a paper submission checklist app over the package. The free ones catch the classic grad student errors: forgetting to anonymize, uploading the wrong file version, attaching supplements to the void. Senior researchers make these mistakes too, by the way. They just hide it better.
Build the habit early and it compounds. The student who tracks calls for papers in year one is the student submitting confidently in year four, while everyone else is discovering deadlines the week after they pass.
And when your manuscript is ready, confjournal.fyi runs paper formatting and submission checks so the venue gets a clean package.