Wedding Planning Checklist
The importance of having a Wedding Planning Checklist
Planning a wedding is a daunting, but exciting prospect. Your wedding will be the biggest occasion you will ever organize and with the average wedding coming in at a whopping $30,000, you need to make use of every tool available to you. One such tool which will be invaluable to your planning is a wedding planning checklist, but why are they such a key factor to the success of your wedding day?
Typically planning a wedding can take anywhere from 12 to 18 months with every element of the day needing to be arranged/booked/purchased at a set time during this period. There is little point buying your wedding cake at the very beginning - it will be stale by the time the wedding comes around; likewise sending out your wedding invitations 2 weeks before the big day could see you low on guests, as many will not have had sufficient time to make arrangements to attend.
So you can see that it is important to organize your wedding with a timeline in place to make sure everything is done by the time your wedding day arrives. This is where a wedding planning checklist comes in to play. It will itemize each element in order of when it should be completed, from choosing the wedding date at 18 months, to making your wedding favors with 4 weeks to go.
The use of a wedding planning checklist will also show you just how much goes into a wedding, the number and types of suppliers you will need, the small details you will need to consider and everyone's role on the big day. To not have an itemized checklist which is properly laid out in chronological order could see you floundering in the wilderness, wondering what you should do next and worse still, omitting many important details of your day.
Wedding planning can be very stressful and a checklist can help you to organize your time, delegate tasks to others and prioritize other commitments to fit in. The use of a notebook to record anything and everything to do with your wedding will also be a vital piece of equipment when organizing your wedding day and it is a good place to keep your wedding planning checklist for easy reference when you need it.
There are many free checklist's available to download from the internet. Some are fairly comprehensive, others less so, but you need to find one which best suits the style and scale of wedding you want. Many will begin at 18 months, but you can adjust the timeline accordingly should you want your wedding to be sooner or later than this. Typically they will take on a list format which itemizes each element of the day and the time when it should be completed or perhaps considered. There may well be a tick box alongside to fill in once a task is completed.
Some checklists may go into great detail about each element of the wedding. This is great if you are not sure of something but can make the overall checklist rather long and a little awkward to use. Go for a clean list style checklist which can be printed out on one or two sheets of paper and which will fold neatly into your other wedding planning notes. Once you have chosen your wedding planning checklist I recommend going through it and deleting anything which is not relevant to your wedding and adding in anything which may be missing.
Use your checklist to plot dates on a calendar to show when significant elements of the wedding need to be completed by; these include choosing the venues for the ceremony and reception, booking your wedding transportation, ordering your wedding cake etc. Writing these down on a calendar will give you a second point of reference should your checklist go missing or for others to keep track of progress. Your calendar will be equally as important as your wedding planning checklist as it will give you the ability to note down important meetings such as meeting the wedding planner or florist, your dress fittings and dates when things need to be collected.
A checklist will merely tell what needs to be done and when it should be done. Once you have achieved something on it, you can tick it off as completed. A calendar and notebook will allow you to record more details such as times, dates, names and addresses, contact numbers and quotes. The three work together to help you plan your wedding in an efficient and organized manner. Whether you are organized or disorganized, I strongly recommend you use one.
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