Planning your wedding doesn’t need to be the headache it can be. There are plenty of tips and tricks that will help you to successfully plan your wedding. However, the key to start all this off is preparation, preparation, preparation. You can’t just dive into planning blindly, you have to get organised first.
Don’t get lazy
The most important thing to get yourself organised is not to get lazy or complacent when you get engaged. Yes, it is a time to get excited and bask in your happiness, but there’s also no time like the present when it comes to getting yourself organised.
Set aside time
It’s good to go into wedding planning with an actual plan for planning. We know, it sounds complicated but rather than just carelessly doing a little bit here and there, get organised and make a definite plan about when you’re going to sit down and do some wedding planning. Just make sure you don’t let it take over your life. You should have at least one absolute wedding-free day so that your lives and your relationship doesn’t become all about the wedding. Remember, it’s the marriage you said yes to, not just the wedding.
Share duties
Decide early on how you’re going to share the duties. There are plenty of ways your groom can help take the pressure off you without taking sole responsibility for decisions you’d rather make together. Make a general plan of things that will have to be done and how you’re going to split them up. Here are eight possible ways he can help.
Buy organised stationery
Buy a diary, a calendar, a wedding binder and some notebooks. This may seem excessive but you will be surprised how important these things will become. Hang your calendar up at home and make sure it matches your “on the go” diary so that every vendor appointment, consultation and meeting can be jotted down and won’t be missed. The notebooks are for you, your groom and possibly your chief bridesmaid, so that you can all keep track of anything wedding-related in one notebook and stay organised so that you won’t lose any notes. Finally, your binder is the holy grail during the months leading up to your wedding. Fill it with vendor information, inspirations, notes and anything else you can think of.
Make lists
Make lists constantly throughout the planning process and always check them twice. Weekly, biweekly or monthly to-do lists will keep you organised and on track and make sure you don’t forget to do something. When your list starts to get half done and a bit crowded, scrap it and make a new list with just the things left that you have to do so that you don’t get confused.
Create a weddings inbox folder
Make a separate folder in your inbox for all wedding related things so that nothing gets lost in your main inbox which is probably filled with hundreds of old emails (if you’re anything like the rest of us, you won’t have cleared it out in years!) Alternatively, create a whole new email account for just your wedding items. Make this email address the RSVP email address and contact all your vendors with this address. That way, everything is organised in one place and nothing else is in that place.
Process everything regularly
Once a month or so, go through your whole binder and inbox and clear everything that has become irrelevant (or put them into a separate folder). It may seem needless, but that binder will continue to fill with important information that will narrow down to more important information the closer you get to the wedding. There’s no point in having to trawl through pages and pages or roses and carnations when you’ve already chosen peonies, or pages and pages of dresses when you bought yours already. You don’t need extra stuff clogging up your binder or your brain so do a regular clear out and sign off on any outstanding items when possible.
Refer back to your lists
When in doubt, always refer back to your lists and your diary on a regular basis. What’s still left to do? What did I forget to go back to? Did I leave anything off the list? Lists are the key to making sure everything is organised and running as it should and it’s important to keep refreshing them. It’s also important to write even the smallest of details down. It may seem silly at the time, and you may think it’s not possible to forget certain things, but wedding brain is a lot like baby brain. You have too much to remember to trust your normal abilities of retention and if it’s not on the list, it might be left by the wayside.
- Jenny Darmody
Image Credits: Bride and groom: Lisa Lefkowitz | Bride: Abigail Malone | Bride and groom: Jose Villa | Centrepiece: Jessica Burke Photography