How To Avoid Overwhelm When Planning Your Wedding

The wedding planning process does not need to feel overwhelming.

• Yes it is a large project with many moving pieces.
• Yes it may be something you’ve never done before.
• Yes you may have heard from friends that it can feel like another job – you know the one you do after you’ve worked all day.

But when you take the time to break all the tasks into smaller sections (or what we like to call phases) of relatable tasks, you can start to see how decisions can be made in such a way that anticipates what is coming.

A phased approach to event planning is one of the keys to avoiding overwhelm.

Let me show you how.

The Traditional Way To Plan A Wedding

Most couples plan their wedding using a totality approach – and most often unbeknownst to them because they’ve never planned a wedding before. And while there isn’t a right or wrong way to plan an event – there certainly can be a more efficient stress free approach.

One that doesn’t make you feel as if you are searching for what to do next and how to do – for hours and hours. And one that doesn’t leave you feeling like you are constantly chasing your tail trying to figure out what to do, why to do it, and when to do it. 

So what exactly do I mean by a totality approach? It’s when your wedding planning strategy – usually just a checklist pulled from Pinterest – leads your planning experience without considering how decisions should naturally lead from one to the next. Its a grab bag of sorts. The to do’s are ordered but the strategy behind each step and how it impacts the next decision making time point isn’t crystal clear. 

This approach can make you feel like you are guessing as you make decisions – especially when you come to later decisions that are directly impacted by those that came earlier in the process.

Take building your guest list for example. The impact of your guest list can be seen at almost every touch point of your event:

• your venue selection – because your guest experience is directly impacted by shouldn’t even look at venues that can’t accommodate your number.
• your hotel selection
• your transportation
• your florist selection – because
• your stationary selection
• your rental selection
• your meal selection
• etc, etc, etc

But most checklists don’t take the time identify why it’s incredibly important to take the time to really hone in on this number. Or if they do – it takes hours and hours and hours of research and reading articles to find the reasons why.

The Power Of Planning Strategy

A great planning strategy, however, should move you through the planning experience – by providing you at each point with details that help you know: 

(1) What to do

(2) When to do it

(3) Why you are doing it then &

(4) When a decision is needed by 

Most checklists fail to provide you with points 2-4 and only tell you what to do. This is where frustration, overwhelm and hours of your valuable time are lost. 

And, even more, most checklists often fail to tease out design based decisions from logistical based decisions – never pointing out how they relate to each out, how they inform each other, and how when tackled in a specific order can lead to a truly more cohesive event. Instead all the decisions are jumbled together – forcing you to tease them apart. Ultimately this results in feeling 

What if I were to tell you there is a better way to approach wedding planning? One that promises to give you a more streamlined experience because it takes into account all the important big and small logistical details, separates them from the design details, and then shows you how they all come back together – resulting in a much more cohesive event?

Because there is. 

The Two Essential Planning Processes

There are essentially two aspects of event planning that run parallel to each other, that rely on each other, and that inform each other. They each have a specific step by step approach to help ensure all aspects of each are accounted for. 

These two parts are the logistical elements & the design elements and when laid out for you in a phased roadmap, you can begin to see how critical elements of each inform each other. And when you are able to see them broken out this way, you are able to see how each informs the other. You are able to anticipate how your decisions today will impact your decisions tomorrow. And most importantly you are able to see when a critical decision is needed so that you have the foundation for the decisions that will come next. 

So let’s show you where each of these elements comes into play during the wedding planning experience.

A Six Phased Approach To Event Planning

This six phased approach was created to help organize wedding planning into smaller segments. Each segment has a theme and tasks within are aimed at meeting a larger overarching goal for that phase of the planning process. The six phases are:

• Phase One: Foundation
• Phase Two: Development
• Phase Three: Design
• Phase Four: Production & Management
• Phase Five: Coordination
• Phase Six: Execution

 

It starts with the first two phases – which are mostly logistical. This is where you will build the foundation of your event and follow it by developing some of the essential elements. These two phases are critically important to the design work you do in phase three. Yes, we save the full design effort for phase three – with the exception of one important activity that takes place in phase one.

Phase four is where the logistical and design facets come together to work in harmony to produce all the design dreams. In this phase, the logistical decisions that were made in phase one and two guide each step of the design production. Phase five is then where all the efforts are aligned and where assurances are made that each of the details – both from a logistical and design perspective – are accounted for. Followed finally by phase six – execution – where the hard work is brought to life. 

Within each of these phases there are specific event based tasks that help achieve the objective for that part of the planning process. Tasks that are broken in a process that helps ensure each will naturally lead to and help inform the next.

Grab your free guide here & get started today!

We’ve put together this free guide to help you take charge of your event planning using this streamlined approach. Grab your’s today and let us know in the comments what questions you have! We’d love to help make your planning experience seamless!