The process of planning a wedding is very much like building a home – and the blueprint is the step by step roadmap.

The blueprint is a builders most reliable resource – filled with details that enable the contractor with the ability to know what to do when.

But the how and the why is where the contractor, with all his experience and knowledge,  helps to operationalize the blueprint. Using experience and teamwork he takes the blueprint and turns it into a home bit by bit by bit.

Your wedding deserves this level of detailed operational guidance.

It deserves a tool that serves and supports you as you plan something you’ve likely never planned before. Providing you with detailed guidance on what to do, when to do it, why to do it then, and how to get it done.

But there are three major planning myths that often derail a planning experience before it even starts. Resulting in lost time, frustration, overwhelm, and ultimately impacting the success of your event planning.

Today we are going to debunk these planning myths, by empowering you with a tool to make your event planning experience better!

 

Myth One | All I Need Is A Checklist 

A checklist is absolutely an essential piece of the event planning puzzle. It helps to identify and organize the essential tasks necessary to produce a successful event. The sole purpose of a checklist is to help guide the planning process by identifying what needs to be done.

Great checklists will go one step further and will delineate and organize tasks according to time. When broken down into months rather than categories, a checklist can help frame and order how you approach completing your tasks. 

But this is where the support of a checklist ends. Stand alone checklists most often fail to include what is arguably the most important feature of the event planning process puzzle – the why and the how.

The Why

Without an understanding of why a task should be completed at a given time point, the downstream implications of the decision are often misunderstood.

   The why

• helps to create boundaries by framing the decision in light of the larger event
• gives context to how a decision early in the process made by x date informs later decisions
• is what helps keep the planning on track

The How

The how is the missing piece from almost every couples’ event planning process. And if you’ve never planned a wedding this is where the overwhelm, frustration, and lost time lead to stress in the process.

The how is the

• step by step guidance used to complete a task.
• operationalizes the task {the what} so that you can cross it off your list and move on to the next.

For example – your wedding checklist may tell you build your budget. So you head to excel and get started only to realize this is where the questions start to flood in:
            How much does an average wedding cost?

            How do I figure out how much money I actually need to plan a wedding?

           How do I know how much of my total budget to allocate to each planning category?

           How do I know how many planning categories there are?

          What tool is actually the best to use to keep track of my budget and then my spending in the months            ahead?

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

We could demonstrate a similar experience for almost every checklist task.

What happens next, leads us to myth 2.

Myth Two | A Resource Can Be Built From Lots of Resources 

When your checklist – as your go to planning resource – fails to provide you with “{how to complete task x,y,z}” you end up doing one of the following – if not all of the following:

• Heading to Google
• Heading to Pinterest
• Heading to the Knot {or other planning resource) 

And by the 3rd or 4th time,  you realize you’ve spent more time searching without getting any closer to an answer. So you head to:

• Amazon 
• Barnes and Noble 

To buy a wedding planning book or binder or both.

Whew.

And now the work can finally begin.

Until you start to feel like the resources you are referencing when you try to determine how to piece this together aren’t consistent.

And some

• seem out of date
• seem incomplete
• lead you down a rabbit hole of trying to piece together recommendations from 5+ different articles

And before you know it, you are no closer to your answer. You have no idea where to turn for reliable information. And you’ve spent too much of your time looking for an answer without even starting the task.

All of this is to show you that even though it may be tempting to piece together your event planning guidance,

• it can leave you frustrated
• spending way too much time trying to figure out how to complete a task,
• and uncertain of what guidance to actually trust.

Your time is precious. Your event deserves more.

You deserve a resource that serves you so that you can confidently make a decision and move forward.

Myth Three | Planning An Event Is Easy 

Planning a wedding from start to finish is one of the most comprehensive and detailed planning experiences you will work on. It is full of decisions that lead to micro decisions. But with the right preparation and tools you can easily accomplish every task with confidence.

To start, planning an event takes time, perseverance, and patience. 

In the beginning, you can feel completely overwhelmed by the laundry list of tasks. Many couples have said that just when they feel like they are making progress another five tasks pop up.

This is because planning an event is a series of micro decisions.

Each task on your list often results in a series of smaller decisions. When you have to balance learning how to plan a wedding on top of making decisions for your wedding – all after working your full time job – this is when decision fatigue happens

And you’ve only just begun.

Once you are in the middle of planning, you are going to need attention to detail, organization, and anticipation.

Because at this point, tasks may start to feel like they are running together.  And perhaps you are starting to feel like you are running out of time. And if your organization system was setup correctly, you know that you are knee deep critical design and logistical decisions.

Vendors are starting to ask questions about the timing of things. Maybe feel like you didn’t even know you needed to consider those points at this point in the process.

So you start to rush decisions in order to stay on top of things.

And hope that you won’t regret a decision.

Finally when you reach the final stages of event planning you will need assurance, confidence, and peace.

This is because you’ve spent months, maybe years planning this event and it’s now time to execute all the decisions you’ve made.

You will need a plan to hand off to your vendor team if you don’t have a coordinator currently. But hits hard to know exactly how to do this in the most efficient and organized way. Preparing for this hand off will be one of the most important steps you take in ensuring that you can relax, be present, and fully enjoy your day.

For each of these reasons and timepoints identified above, we recommend that just as you would have a blueprint to guide the home building process you will also need something very similar to support your event planning experience. 

This post isn’t meant to frustrate or overwhelm you, but rather to empower you with an understanding of the complexity of event planning before you get deep into the process.

It is our hope that by demonstrating how these planning myths fail to prepare you for what event planning truly can look like, we are empowering you with a choice to make your event planning experience different.

Stress. Overwhelm. Frustration.

These things rob you of the joy you deserve to experience when you plan a wedding.

And as a team, we’ve worked for over a year to create a tool that can help engaged couples successfully and confidently navigate planning their dream wedding– and ultimately avoid all the myths outlined here.

We’ve put together a one stop shop for your event planning – equipping you with resources that will answer the what, the when, the why, and the how of event planning.

Giving you confidence in your decisions.

Giving you your time back.

And helping you plan the wedding of your dreams as efficiently and effectively as possible!

Head here to learn more! 

Vendor Credits:

Venue: Excelsior

Event Design: Your Sweetest Day Events

Photography: Ali + Paul Co 

Florals: Petals With Style