After getting engaged it can be tempting to dive right in planning. Armed with Pinterest, excitement and a checklist you feel ready to tackle this project. 

It’s not until you are in the thick of planning that you realize there are hundreds of details to account for.

There are: 

Tasks to complete 

Decisions to be made

Research to conduct 

Vendors details needed throughout the process

Payments to be made 

And the list goes on and on. 

A Simple Solution

What can you do to stay on top of it all? 

Very simply your event planning needs a system + an approach to not only organize the pieces and keep track of previous, current, and future decisions.  

Without both a system and an approach to operationalize your system, your event planning can quickly become full of frustration, distraction, overwhelm, and mistakes. 

Today we are sharing with you a simple three part recipe for how to organize your event planning so that you can stay on top of things like:

payment reminders,

event planning tasks,

vendor specific details and requests,

and all the decisions you make in the process. 

Let’s get started! 

The Getting Started Recipe

The YSDE Getting Started Recipe – is made up of three simple yet critical elements: 

• An Organizational System 
• A Roadmap 
• A Reliable Guiding Resource 

Once you’ve created and incorporated these elements – especially at the start of your event planning – your event planning will start to feel seamless. And that is the goal. 

You’re event planning shouldn’t feel uncertain or disorganized. 

Especially when you are investing your time, your money, and your heart into creating a truly once in a life experience – for you, for your family, and for your friends.  

Part One | The Organizational System

Let’s start with the organizational system. You need both a system and an approach to effectively manage, keep track of, account for the following things: 

1. Research 
2. Finalized Vendor Details (contact information, future needs for the vendor, etc)  
3. Payments & Spending 
4. Appointments 
5. Guests 
6. Task Management – What To Do, How To Do It, and When to Complete A 

The system is what you use to physically keep track and order of all the things listed above. It includes things like: 

1. Spreadsheets 
2. Folders 
3. Calendars & Reminder Systems 

And the approach is the way in which you use the tools – and not just in the beginning of your event planning but throughout the entire process. The approach includes 

1. How you setup the system 
2. How you update the system 
3. How you use the system 
   1. to keep you on track (or better yet ahead!) 
   2. to keep track of all the important things (and no sticky notes do not count here!) 

We’ve seen couples use a combination of binders, electronic systems, and calendars to help support filling the system and approach outlined above.

Our recommendation is to use an electronic option – like google drive to help support your organizational needs. Electronic options can be combined with paper to allow for both tools to be used – especially if you prefer paper. But nothing can compare to the flexibility and ease of sharing information as quickly as an electronic tool.

With our team, we keep things streamlined and simplified using google drive with the majority of clients to help keep our work organized. We’ve developed tools and a proven approach to support all the work couples need to effectively implement and execute every step of the planning process and have done so with great success. 

Want a head start on getting your approach and system setup? We’re sharing both our six phased approach to event planning – on that really pushes back on the typical industry approach and  five quick tips to get you started with simplifying and automating your approach to event planning. Both of these gives you an inside seat into how we do things here at YSDE. Grab yours and get started with building your organizational system today! 

Part Two | The Road Map

Your roadmap is essential to laying out a clear + efficient path from engaged to married. Many couples think a simple checklist can meet this need but it goes beyond just a checklist.  

Checklists are very simply a list of required items. 

Just a list. 

Checklists often fails to delineate: 

• When a task needs to be completed by – a deadline
• Why a task needs to be completed – often because it has significant impact on downstream decisions 
• And quite possibly most importantly how to efficiently get the job done. 

Which is why we call it a roadmap – a plan or strategy intended to achieve a particular goal. 

The roadmap goes beyond just listing out what you need to do and gives you an action plan to get it done! 

For an example: each step in your event planning roadmap should encourage decisions to naturally build upon each other. 

Your roadmap  should start with foundational things like

creating a budget

finalizing a guest list,

and determining your preferences 

 

It should then move into (2) developmental work, (3) design work, (4) production work,  (5) coordination work, and (6) execution work. 

These natural phases help define the flow of how to successfully produce an event. 

Your event planning roadmap should anticipate everything that is to come versus reacting to what is happening in the moment. 

If your checklist or resource doesn’t provide you with a roadmap that allows you to see where you are going – its missing something critical and is failing to serve you + your event planning. 

A truly impactful and helpful roadmap is one that 

• Helps you anticipate downstream needs so your decision making can feel grounded versus rushed  
• Identifies a strategic plan to facilitate + operationalize your planning 
• Streamlines the process so that each step naturally flows from one to the next 
• And is built such that critically important aspects of the development happen early! 

We’ve developed a truly unique approach to event planning with a roadmap that is aligned with all of these aspects. Grab our six phased approach to event planning – the YSDE roadmap we use with our planning couples – for free today! 

Part Three | A Reliable Guiding Resource

Finally lets explore the importance of a reliable resource. This one is so important to your success because if you’ve never planned a wedding before the who/the what/the when and the why can be incredibly overwhelming. 

A truly reliable resource is the comprehensive + complete tool you can use to guide your planning every step of the way. It will help you to know: 

• What information you will need to make a decision – both before, during, and after the decision
• How to evaluate options 
• How far in advance you need to make a decision and why

Couples often struggle with identifying a single resource that fulfills all of these facets. Searching for one often requires spending hours + hours + hours on pinterest, google, magazines, and books/binders or worse piecing it together on their own bit by bit – often with each new task. 

Not to mention – resources can often conflict with guidance provided or feel outdated! Resulting in more confusion than you ever bargained for. 

A Truly Modern Solution 

Stumped on where to find reliable resources like this? Many of our couples were too!

It’s why we spent the last year building one – using our signature planning approach that we use with our planning clients infused with years of experience, months of research, and everything you could ever need to plan your wedding.

As an answer to:

• A need for a centralized tool to replace piecing together event planning resources
• Saving forward thinking couples time by doing the research for them
• Condense the planning guidance and infuse it with current recommendations + experience based knowledge + consistent support + upkeep
• Allow the planning guidance of an event planning team be accessible to many instead of the few

We created the Modern Wedding Planner – a simplified step by step planning approach for all couples looking to successfully plan their wedding.

• It’s simple yet comprehensive.
• It’s affordable yet as if you hired a wedding planning team to walk with you.
• It will radically change and thereby improve the way you approach and complete your wedding planning tasks.

Don’t delay get access today + plan your wedding with confidence, excitement and all the tools you need to get the job done!

Photography: Lauren Fair Photography 

Venue: Terrain Events 

HMU: MKUP The Beauty Studio

Florals: