If I could recommend only one thing to help in future wedding planning, it would be...a notebook. Trust me, whether you prefer to write in print or electronically, make sure you pick one--there will be lots of notes to take. If I could recommend two things to help in future planning, it would be a notebook and a checklist. This checklist can be found in a great wedding guidebook like The Ultra Simple Bride's Wedding Planning Guide that my friend recommended to me, or in a copy of MyWedding magazine or The Knot's website and app.
The checklist helped me organize the notebook, figuring out what items I would need and what decisions I would have to make. Each area became a tab (made easily from mini sticky notes) with a few pages allocated for jotting down information in each section. I granted more pages to the big ticket items like venue and photographer, and fewer pages to the smaller decisions like hair and makeup artists.
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| Just a notebook. A thick one. |
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| Tabs.... |
I can easily bring the notebook to venue site tours, and back and forth to work for vendor calls on my lunch break. The material is durable (Five Star brand) even if my homemade tabs are not.
You don't need a huge (or expensive) binder. You just need a place to keep everything in one place so you can make decisions with all the facts, keep track of dates and contacts, and stay inspired. My notebook (admittedly found in the back of my closet so I don't know the name to recommend) happened to contain a couple of plastic pockets where I could store business cards, flyers, and receipts. If you're a visual person, you can even tape pictures to the pages. I decided to forego the tape and just keep images separate in a folder on my phone (a folder appropriately titled, "Wedding Decisions").
You don't need a huge (or expensive) binder. You just need a place to keep everything in one place so you can make decisions with all the facts, keep track of dates and contacts, and stay inspired. My notebook (admittedly found in the back of my closet so I don't know the name to recommend) happened to contain a couple of plastic pockets where I could store business cards, flyers, and receipts. If you're a visual person, you can even tape pictures to the pages. I decided to forego the tape and just keep images separate in a folder on my phone (a folder appropriately titled, "Wedding Decisions").
The sooner you set something up (one time and you're done!), the easier planning will be, for the simple fact that you're not hunting everywhere for your information. While everyone's planning style is different, this one worked especially well for me.
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