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If you’ve been engaged longer than 30 seconds you’ve probably experienced at least a little bit of the dreaded Wedding Planning Overwhelm. Here are my favorite recommendations for how to plan your wedding without losing your mind.
Schedule a wedding planning date. It is suuuper easy to let wedding planning take over your life. The extreme mix of excitement and overwhelm create a monster that wants to kick through your front door and make itself comfy in the space on the couch right between the two of you. It wants to be the center of every conversation & your life. Put the monster in its cage by scheduling a weekly wedding planning date. It should be a reocurring meeting on your calendars to sit and talk wedding details. Pick a time that is not rushed & where you’ll both be of fresh mind to talk logically and unemotionally. & unless it’s absolutely necessary (like if you have meeting with a vendor) DO NOT talk about your wedding outside of that date.
Stay organized. If you haven’t figured it out yet, there are literally hundreds of details to keep track of. Here are some of my favorite ways to stay organized:
Set up a wedding planning email address through GMail. It’s free & will keep all of your wedding related content in one place & keep it from spilling into your everyday life (see above.) I also recommend setting up folders for each vendor for easy searching.
Set up a folder on Google Drive called “Wedding Planning.” Within that folder, create sub folders for each vendor & upload all of your contracts, receipts, questionnaires, floor plans, menus and any other documents you are sent or work on with those vendors in those folders.
Schedule payment reminders. There’s a ton of payments to manage for your wedding, so after you sign your agreement with a new vendor, pull the payment amounts and dates out & put them on your calendar when they are due. Then schedule reminders for yourself 30 days, 2 weeks and 1 day out. If you’re using Google Calendar, you can easily scheduled yourself email reminders so it goes straight to your inbox (verses a notification that you might miss).
Schedule planning related due date reminders. See above, but do the same for due dates when it comes to planning. Scheduling your tasting, deadline for your bridesmaids to order their dresses, final guest count due dates, music selection due date to your band/DJ, etc.
Use Aisle Planner. So while Google is suuuper helpful, what I love about Aisle Planner is that it is a wedding planning software. It’s actually the software I use for planning with each of my clients. They have customizable planning checklists (with due date reminders), budgeting software with built in reminders, a contact management system for keeping track of all of your docs & contact information for your vendor team, timelines, AND you can find vendors & inspiration and save them to your account for future reference. It’s awesome! I love it & I know you will too. And you can save 25% off your first 3 months after your free trial by clicking HERE
Know when to get off Pinterest. Every year I have one couple that just doesn’t know when to get off and stay off Pinterest. It costs them a ton of money & gives both them and their vendor partners a huge headache from all of the changing gears and usually the end product ends up being a disappointment because they veered too far from their original vision. My advice, once the design concept has been finalized with your florist/decorator/stationer, it’s time to log off.
Wondering if you need a Wedding Planner?