Sarahritchie17 The thing about wedding planning that’s good to realize sooner than later is that you’re basically in-charge of coordinating a several-thousand dollar project with a hard deadline. Even if it’s a smaller budget, you’re still undertaking a giant project with significant value (both emotional and monetary) that you and your fiancé(e) will be deciding every detail of. From the budget to the decision fatigue, there are so many new responsibilities to coordinate. Everyone has a question (or five) for you whether its your mom, your guests, or your vendors. It’s a lot.
It’s also just one day of your life, they’ll tell you. Others will tell you it’s the greatest day of your life, and you may feel pressured to make it live up to all your beautifully curated Pinterest-perfect expectations. So how do you manage? Where do you start?
Start here. Take 3 deep breaths. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. And if you read that too fast, I see you… do it again and actually make them deep. You’ve got this.
Next, remember that you and your partner are on the same team. Any time you feel the stress building, remind yourselves that this whole thing is about your love (well, it should be anyways) and celebrating and sharing your love with your other loved ones. Ask, “What do you need? And how can I help?” and communicate when you feel overwhelmed. Plan together, divide and conquer, communicate and compromise, and have some fun along the way. We loved our food tasting, cake tasting, and picking out our must-play songs together.
Here are 4 things we did to stay organized and work as a team throughout the wedding planning process.
1. Shared Inbox
One of the very first things we did when we started to plan our wedding was to open a shared gmail account. We gave all our vendors this email so that 1) all wedding things would go to one place and 2) we both had the ability to access and respond to wedding emails. If you already have a personal gmail account, it’s easy to toggle between the two in the top right corner and the gmail app allows you to see both your inboxes combined or separately.
This also provided a google drive where we could save things and both have access to edit.
2. Kanban Board
The Kanban board is a project management tool that can help you prioritize and manage your time more effectively. We decided to use this tool as a shared picture of where we were at and what needed to get done each month.
The board has you sort tasks into categories: To Do, In Progress, For Review, and Done. Since there is a limited amount of space in each category on the board, you have to complete tasks that are in progress before you can start new ones. This helps to keep the project moving and not be so overwhelming.
For our board, we changed the “To Do” column to “Backlog/Upcoming” to better capture what we wanted that category to mean.
I started with wedding planning timelines I found on Pinterest and put together a Word document of all the tasks we needed to complete and what month they should each fall into. I’ve uploaded it here for your reference. We had a condensed timeline since we won a wedding giveback and all our vendors were already chosen, so your timeline may look a lot different than ours.
Since there are so many tasks involved with wedding planning and so as not to get overwhelmed, I only added tasks to the board month by month. Our wedding was in November, so on June 1, I transcribed the tasks for 5-months-out onto individual post-it notes.
As we started and completed tasks, we would move the post-its to the right. It was a great visual for us to see where we were at and what we needed to prioritize next.
We used different colored post-its to represent which month those tasks went up on the board. There were a lot of tasks that carried over month to month that we just couldn’t get done with everything else we had going on. It wasn’t a big deal. Most details of wedding planning can be coordinated up to a month before the wedding once you are in contact with your vendors, but if you leave everything to the last month, you’re going to cause yourself a lot of unnecessary stress. The color-coding just helped to see which tasks had been sitting for a while.
3. Zola
Creating our wedding website on Zola was free, easy, and gave us so many tools to help along the way. We were able to start our registry there, keep guests informed, manage RSVPs, and get holiday cards and thank you cards addressed for free. That’s just to name a few of the perks. I can’t recommend it enough.
Referral link: When you spend $100, we’ll both get $20 in Zola credit!
https://www.zola.com/invite/eddiesarahwright20230611154034994
Side Note: You can add other registries to your Zola registry. We added Crate & Barrel and Amazon. We had a fun date doing one of Crate & Barrel’s Registry Events. You can check their website to find one in your area. It’s a private and free event where the shop in closed except to you and other engaged couples, and you can scan barcodes in-store to add items to your registry. They also provide small bites and a gift (ours was a set of wine glasses)!
Crate & Barrel referral link: When you create your Crate & Barrel Wedding Registry and $250 in gifts are purchased, you’ll get a $50 wedding gift from Crate & Barrel, and I’ll get $100. https://www.talkable.com/x/jyT34g
4. Set Boundaries for Talking Wedding
Wedding planning can be really overwhelming. It’s like working a second full-time job at times. But it’s probably not your full-time job. While you may have to chat with vendors or make decisions about your wedding on weeknights, you can’t let it take over your life. You may have to set boundaries with your partner and also with family members. There will be so many questions from all directions. Everyone wants to know all the details and where you’re at in the planning process. Don’t be afraid to say “let’s find another time to talk about this,” or establish a time each week that you’re going to focus on wedding planning. Be realistic about how much time you need to commit to stay on track, but know that you don’t have to be on your bride game 24/7.
Want more wedding content? Check out these posts:
If you like what you read here, follow @genuinesunshineblog on Instagram and look for new posts here at genuinesunshineblog.com every Sunday to start your week with sunshine!
