Wedding Blog
{You know the movie reference, right?}
Yesterday’s rant about our dear fiances and their sometime lack of understanding of the bazillion details that brides have to handle struck a chord with me. Yea, duh, since I wrote it, but also because I so related to all of your comments. I kept thinking, I’m having a hard time with the details — yea, because I don’t want to have to deal with them and because it annoys me that Mr. Stinky Cheese has no clue how much I’m dealing with — but I’m not having to worry about the task management aspect. Meaning, I’m a trained project manager, perfectly capable of handling dependencies and shifting timelines and priorities and delegations in my head. Woe to the poor girls who have to plan a whole wedding without that background.
But I might be way off base. Perhaps it’s easier for the rest of humanity (first-world brides, anyway) to deal with it than me. Maybe it’s my background that causes my frustration that it’s not easier and faster. Maybe if I buckled down and got it all together, I’d be better off. But if that’s not the case, and you’re struggling too, what do you need? How can I help? Who knows, maybe it’ll make me get it together and treat this like a work project. There are a thousand templates and checklists and systems out there, and quite a few good references on this site.
Would it be helpful for me to aggregate them into one post? Do you want a one-stop-shop with pros and cons of the major wedding planning tools out there? If I built a simple wedding planning project plan, would that help? I quickly gave up on much of what was out there because my wedding doesn’t require it all, and I didn’t want to figure out what was necessary and what was (to me) fluff.
Share your most helpful online (or otherwise) wedding planning tools in the comments! Together, we can make our weddings easier to plan!
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Well actually I found that the “planners” made it harder. I worked backwards, I wrote down everything I expected to happen on our wedding day “we will wake up in a hotel room. we will be married by a rabbi, I will wear a white dress, we will have a photographer…” and then all the tasks we had to do to make that happen “purchase white dress” and then backwards again until I was at the simplist, easiest step. Then the stuff that seemed like more effort than it was worth got cut. Made things pretty easy.
I’ve found The Knot’s checklist to be helpful. It can be daunting at times, but it’s nice that it doesn’t forget anything and you can add your own appointments or things to the list that only apply to you (like if you are having a backyard wedding like Miss Cheese and need to remember to order plants!)
I also like theknot’s checklist. Their budget has helped me as well, I truly didn’t know how much to delegate for each expense, and I honestly hadn’t thought to budget for our parent’s gifts or our rings. I guess I thought they’d magically pay for themselves!
I’ve also made a list of things I want for my wedding and pared the list down after researching costs and considering reality. I thought about how important each item was to us and asked my fiance to list his top three most important elements in his dream wedding. He said food, booze, and location. That led me to Vegas!
I would love to see your compilation of organizing tools. I am always on the search for a better organizational system — wedding related or otherwise.
I just ordered the Mindy Weiss organizer. I was excited because it has 25 or so categories. I kept checking the UPS tracker waiting for it to arrive. I was crushed to find the inner three ring binder broke from the backing and other minor damage. I am sending it back and going to try again.
I, too, would love to see a list of organizational tools. For me - a total Type A - it really helped to have a binder. A physical organizer of everything from receipts to contracts to images to lists and so on. I bought a ton of page protectors, so that I could slip images from bridal magazines that were close to what I want to see on the day or inspire me. Then I tear the images out of the magazines and put them in the binder under their proper sections - flowers, attire, etc. Type A indeed! But it’s been really helpful.
@Jenny Bee: None of those bridal organizers seem to be sturdy enough to hold all the things a bride really needs in her organizer. I took all the lists and whatnot that came with my organizer and put them in one of those ginormous three-ring binders you can get at CVS or Office Max or whatever. That really did the trick. Good luck!
I found google notebook to be infinitely helpful in keeping track of websearches that were done at work and home on different machines. I really like the idea of something that is custimizable for what you want to have in your wedding. Have a Q&A session then a custom made project management tool based on those wants and priorities.
I’d love to see a compiled list.. I’ve looked at a lot of different ones and sometimes I don’t know where to start. Luckily I have a ton of time to figure it all out, but it can get pretty overwhelming.
@mandalynn17: LOL. I swear, I read that and thought, “Crap, I need to order roses!”
i use iDo wedding software and it is a lifesaver! heard about it from a former bee, Mrs. Pomegranate
http://www.weddingbee.com/2008/08/27/wedding-planner-seating-software/
I ignored all forms of checklists. I find them far too confusing and unneccesary. I’m super orgainsed myself so I sat down and thought through the entire wedding, from getting ready to leaving for the honeymoon and made my own tailored “to do list”. And the feeling of crossing off the tasks one by one can’t be beat!
Pretty much anything that you can come up with is better than what I have, which is a compilation of about 5 different checklists, all of which give me different timelines/deadlines.
Every time I go to a bookstore I check out the wedding planning section, buy another book, take it home and read it and get more confused than I was in the first place.
Information overload at its finest.
I like the Google Wedding Planner, and I learned about it here. I can’t remember which bee though…my bad!
I have found that most planners and tools are too exhaustive, or too simple and ultimately and I probably wouldn’t rely on one unless I was having a really short engagement and couldn’t afford to forget about buying underwear for my first fitting for a few more weeks.
There are lots of professions that nuture skills that might make a wedding less stressful, but in my experience, brides plan their weddings just like they plan the rest of their lives. If you live your life with an excel budget spreadsheet **Raises hand** then you probably have one for your wedding budget, ya know? Or, like one of my best friends, if you fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants then you’ll probably be on the phone to the groom a half hour before the ceremony deciding which vows to use!
I have found that keeping a budget, clippings, a short-term to do list, and then sketching out my ideas really helped. That would be my best suggestion to a bride that wants to do a lot of DIY for her wedding. Sketch out what the space will look like with all of your projects included, and then write a list of each component projects down the side of your sketch. Number one, it showed me that I didn’t need to do as many things as I thought (Because the image started to look cluttered!), Number two, everytime I look at it, I take a quick inventory at a glance of things I have to do, and number three, I’m not spending my wedding planning drooling over Martha images of perfection that give me super high expectations for my own results. That’s what’s worked best for me, especially since we’re doing an at-home wedding too!
I wonder if my office planner Deskaway would help with wedding planning. For my work atleast these software planning thingies can be very helpful.
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Mrs. Cheese, Knoxville
Age and Occupation: 29, Engineering Manager
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 27, CAD Designer
Engagement Date: July 31, 2008
Wedding Date: May, 2009
Blogging Since: October 16, 2008
Venue: Our home and the two acres it sits on
About Me: I’m an emotional girl who loves sentimental things, parenthetical asides, and trying to do things herself. I can cook, sew, am a whiz at planning, terrible at delegating, and totally in love with my fiancé (who will be my second husband but first love of the rest of my life). For our home/ garden/ DIY wedding, we’ll be moonlighting as interior designers, home improvers, and gardeners with the help of our fabulous friends and neighbors. We can’t wait to be married, and are learning how fun getting married can be.
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