Georgina Clatworthy

So you’ve been working sooo hard with your wedding planning, often up until the wee small hours making sure you have every little detail covered. Checking out all the latest celebrity weddings to see what ideas you can steal, looking at the latest trends in wedding dresses and drawing endless sketches of what your wedding cake will look like! Planning a wedding has never been so easy.

Or has it?

Here are 8 reasons why your many hours spent online and thumbing through numerous wedding magazines may not be as fruitful as you think!

1. Social Networking: whilst Facebook and Twitter are great places to chat with your friends and family, discuss wedding related issues and of course, keep everyone up to day with your wedding planning, playing Farmville does not count towards your wedding! Nor does hours spent seeking out celebrity brides on Twitter in the hope of getting some ideas!

2. Forums: of course the 1Weddingsource forum is a fantastic place to meet and chat with other brides, vendors and just about anyone else who lurks on these things all hours of the day. However, you will achieve very little with your wedding planning by spending all your time starting and answering threads on just about every possible issue, problem and question you may have. Eventually you will realize your wedding planning is hopelessly behind track despite all your forum activity.

3. Hours Spent Trying To Find Out About Other People’s Weddings: it is always nice to check out what other brides are doing. But looking at what they are doing is not going to help you work out what you need to be doing to make your wedding day dreams a reality. Sure spend half an hour looking about, compliment other ideas and then get on with booking the photographer and ordering your wedding favors.

4. Is This You? ‘I was up at 2am this morning looking at Katy Perry’s wedding. Do you know she had four elephants in her bridal procession and she had five different wedding dresses!’ If you find your planning notes consist of useless bits of information like this then I have some news for you – you have been wasting your time and your own wedding does not even have a venue, let alone room for four elephants!

5. You Have 10 Scrapbooks Full Of Great Wedding Theme Ideas. Which One Have You Chosen? If the answer to this is zero, or you have a moodboard lying on the kitchen table only a third finished, then guess what? You haven’t been organizing your wedding at all, you have simply fallen victim to being sidetracked. If you have been working on wedding themes for more than six months it is time to bite the bullet, pick one and move on!

6. Similarly, You Think You Have Found ‘The One’: but with each new wedding magazine issue comes a wealth of new frocks and that old friend indecision comes visiting once again! If you do not pick one soon you will find that the wedding day is upon you and you simply have ‘nothing to wear!’ Put the magazines down and get down to the bridal store and place your order – NOW!

7. You Are Not Doing Any Wedding Planning At All: you know you should be, you know you need to be, this wedding will not organize itself and the wedding date is fast approaching. This is perhaps more common than you think, either because many brides neglect their wedding planning duties in favor of all the pre-wedding parties! Or because they have simply lost their wedding planning mojo, as can often happen with brides who work a full time job on top of trying to plan their dream day. On the first one: put the cocktails down, pull out your notebook and get on the phone. With the second one: if you are finding it too exhausting to work full time and plan your wedding then you need to hire a wedding planner or delegate much of the work to someone else close to you.

8. You Think That 18 Months Is More Than Enough Time To Plan Your Wedding: and instead you spend your days watching repeats of Oprah! 18 months is plenty of time to plan a wedding, 6 weeks before the wedding day is not! If you want a dream wedding day then you need to begin planning right from the start, get your bookings down and furthermore – turn off the TV!

There are many ways in which you can waste your time planning a wedding, some of which you may not even realize! The solution is to get on top of it from the start and enjoy it! Be realistic about what you can achieve and strict with yourself about how you go about your daily wedding tasks. You could just be surprised about how much you can achieve and how easy the decision making process becomes.