For time management, identifying key milestones or activities is very important. First of all you need to identify the key submission dates of Journal/conference and then link those times lines with your key activities and for this purpose, creating GANTT chart is very common. To create a GANTT chart, use MS Project by Microsoft is very useful. There are many other software as well for this purpose.
For academic writing, use Grammarly software to reduce your editing time and refine language of your article.