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Avoid Wedding Prep Panic by Staying Organized
I am sure you have ALL taken my advice and hired an amazing wedding planner to help guide you through the wedding planning process. Even so, when it comes to wedding planning, trying to remember thousands of tiny details can get overwhelming.
Wedding planning can be super fun, but there are also moments when as a bride, you may have a moment of panic. As I was planning my own wedding during the pandemic, I would wake up in the wee hours of the night with some wedding nightmare and send text messages to myself and add notes on my phone to help me remember things. Those are great immediate strategies to capture your thoughts, but who wants to scroll through nine million text messages and seven billion notes on your phone the next morning to remember all your wedding tasks?
Benefits of Using a Wedding Planning Checklist
To make things easy, I created a wedding planning checklist that I use with my full-service planning clients. The benefit of having a wedding planner is that they will create a checklist and manage progress toward your wedding day so you can see step by step how your wedding planning is progressing and spend your time and energy enjoying your engagement. If, however, you are hoping to handle many of the wedding logistics yourself or are feeling a bit stressed and would like something to help you stay organized, breaking up all of your wedding tasks into individual items will make your planning process much more manageable.
Customizing an Easy-to-Use Wedding Planning Checklist
The Kristine Smith Designs Wedding Planning Checklist template is an easy-to-use wedding planning checklist that provides space to list your essential wedding tasks, includes a spot to list a timeline for completion, and a space for notes to yourself. To use this checklist, download a copy for yourself to your Google Drive and then you can easily share it with your partner, wedding planner, or bridesmaids. One of my favorite elements of this wedding planning checklist are the small checkboxes that are included next to each item. There is no better feeling than checking off wedding tasks!
Important Elements to Include on a Wedding Planning Checklist
If you are looking at the blank checklist and feeling overwhelmed, I created a sample wedding planning checklist to provide some ideas on all the nitty gritty details that can be included on a checklist. For this sample, I included a number of important components that you might want to incorporate when thinking through your wedding planning process.
This is nowhere near an exhaustive list, but you can use the sample to see how I set up milestones and space them out over the entire wedding planning experience so that the planning process doesn’t feel so overwhelming. I also like to color code tasks once they are complete so that at a quick glance I can see how much of the planning process is complete and how much further we have left to go. If you wanted to customize these items you can add a column for "person responsible" which can help keep communication clear between you and your partner when dividing up the wedding tasks.
Take Wedding Planning One Day at a Time
When it comes to wedding planning, it can be easy to get overwhelmed. No one tells you when you get engaged how many decisions you'll need to make through out the wedding planning process. It can be easy to get caught up in all the details. My advice is to take things one day at a time and create a system to stay organized so that you preserve the fun in the wedding planning process. It is my sincerest hope that this wedding planning checklist will help you on your way to be stress free on your wedding day!