Making Time for Wedding Planning
OVERWHELM. Planning a wedding, even with an excellent planner on your side can be really quite overwhelming. The decisions you need to make seem endless. Things you never thought you could possibly care about are all the sudden putting you over the edge, you’re not making any real progress without it taking your entire weekend and you just want to pull your hair out and get married already!
Are you familiar with that feeling that there aren’t enough hours in the day? You’re not alone. Whether you are a bride (or, well, a human) I think we have all been there. Go go go. Push push push. Get it ALL done.
At the end of a long day, you look at your to-do list and you STILL didn’t get it all done. Can you relate?
The biggest problem I used to make with my daily to-do list was this:
I didn’t add verbs to make the tasks actionable. That SINGLE addition changed so much for me. Let’s see if you can spot the difference.
Here is how my to-do lists used to look:
Edit
Dishes
Laundry
Emails
Ebook
Website
Straighten Up
Grocery Store
Concise and to the point. I mean how can that NOT get done, right? This is why…
Here’s how this same list would look now:
Take a shower
Get dressed
Dry hair
Style hair
Apply makeup
Make breakfast
Clear the table
Wash breakfast dishes
Get the kids dressed
Pack the kid’s bags
Put the kid’s laundry in the washer
Drive kids to daycare while listening to 1,000 Little Things
Put laundry in the dryer
Edit the detail photos from Katie + Matthew’s wedding
Export the detail photos to gallery
Fold laundry while the photos are exporting listening to same book
Load photos to gallery
While photos load, make lunch while listening to music
Eat lunch with Marc
Wash lunch dishes
Respond to emails
Make list of new tasks from emails
Edit girls getting ready photos
Export photos
Outline chapter 5 Rules of Light Quality while exporting
Load photos to gallery
Update portrait photos on website with new session faves while photos load
Walk Lily around the block
Tidy living room/kitchen area
Tidy our room
Tidy kid’s room
Tidy office space
Make dinner while Marc picks up kids while listening to MY music
Eat dinner as a family
Wash dishes while Andrew and Isaac clear table
Discuss grocery store requests with Andrew and Isaac while in the same room together
Make grocery store list on Trello
Ask Marc to add anything he wants to the list
30 minutes “no screen zone” with Finn and Rita
Put Finn and Rita to bed
Go grocery shopping
Put groceries away
Make to-do list for tomorrow
Do you see the difference? A once, simple, “how can I NOT get this done” list as now been revealed to be what it is: too vague and impossibly too much. This is a disease in our society today. A sickness of “I can do it all.” When you really list out everything that needs to happen in a day to get all that done, the reality sets in. It’s too much. We are trying to do too much in a day.
How does this get you any closer to having a nicely planned wedding? It helps you be realistic and realize that you are human. You are a human with a job and a real life to take care of ON TOP of planning. The best advice I can give you is to make a master list of all the things that need to happen and start breaking them down into actionable steps that you can take on a DAILY basis and take that one step each day. Do one thing that might take a 15-30 minute block of focused time. Get it done and move on with your day. Every day. Do this every day and it will become habitual. Maybe it is what you do after dinner each day. Clear the table and sit down to do that one thing before retiring to watch TV for the evening.
Your daily habits define who you are more accurately than any instagram profile ever will. When you can make this block of time available on a regular basis, you will still have it available when your wedding is over for something else to keep plugging away at throughout your life. You can use your wedding planning to carve out time for those “other” things that will ultimately come up throughout your life….all the time. As a mom of 4, now that time for me is filled with school paperwork, playtime and baseball schedules.
Wedding planning will be replaced with dog training. Which will be replaced with baby care. Which will be replaced with needy toddlers. Which will be replaced with playdates, books, and puzzles. Which will be replaced with birthday party planning and homework. Which will be replaced with driving to friend’s houses. Which will be replaced with ballgames. Which will be replaced with college visits. Which will be replaced with….and on and on it goes.
There will always be something. The sooner you learn to account for it and simplify the better you will be throughout your life.
Leave time for the in-between moments of life. In those moments you will find the real treasures of life. Don’t overcommit them away.