Step 2: Prioritize

I would argue that this is the most important step in zen wedding planning.  Fortunately, I found it really  fun!  This step involves really zeroing in on the aspects of your wedding that you find the most important to you and your fiance.  These are the things you will focus most of your energy towards.  Don't rush this step.  I spent at least a week reflecting on my expectations of the wedding and making a list of things that are --and aren't!-- important to me using google docs (I will talk more about how google played a huge part in our WPP in the next step).  Prioritizing will only lead to zen wedding planning if you take your priorities to heart and only allow yourself to get stressed out about the top items.  Everything else will fall into place.
One suggestion I have is that you do minimal planning before you have your priorities sorted out.  Try to refrain from obsessing over wedding style blogs or researching venues before you have a clear idea of what is important to you.  I know you're excited to start wedding planning, but I think all the wedding hype can detract from figuring out what's important to you.

Know yourself
I think weddings should be a reflection of the type of couple you are, so take some time to reflect on your style and values.  My fiance and I are both generally festive but low maintenance people.  We knew from the start we wouldn't have an elaborate theme, whether it be a DIY rustic event, or a formal black tie affair. We're also not that big into style or design, so we decided to not spend too much energy on decoration details.  What things define you as a couple?

Reminisce
Ok, generally it's a pretty awful idea to compare your wedding to someone else's, but in this case I found it extremely helpful.  If you're anything like me, you've been to about a dozen weddings in the past year or two.  Think back to them.  Recall the aspects of the weddings that have stayed with you, or made an impression.  Things that come to mind when I think of recent weddings I've attended: drinking my face off at an open bar, abusing my photo booth rights, dancing to cheesy 90's music, spending time with friends, crying at the ceremony.  Things I couldn't remember if you held a gun to my head: centerpieces, flowers, the wedding gown, color scheme, etc.  As a wedding guest it's the experience that mattered to me, not decorations or style.  Thinking back to other weddings I've been to made it easy for me to put things like flowers and centerpieces at the bottom of the list without thinking twice.  It also helped me to bump the quality of food up on the list, since I remembered a few disappointing meals at wedding, and one phenomenal meal.

Construct two lists
Document the list of things that are and are not important to you with a "Top Priorities" and "Bottom Priorities" list.  Keep them somewhere that is easy to refer back to and update.  When I got stuck thinking of things to prioritize, I found it helpful to look at a wedding planning book or website, look at the chapter titles for main aspects of the wedding.  I would imagine my wedding had the best, most expensive wedding cake/flowers/DJ/etc ever, then I would imagine my wedding had the simplest, lowest tier cake/flowers/DJ/etc.  Sometimes there was a big difference in how I felt about having the "best" of something versus having the "worst" of something, both logically and emotionally.  These were things I put on my top priority list.  Sometimes the idea of having the biggest and best of something didn't strike a chord with me, so I'd put it on my bottom priorities list.

Accepting your priorities
Once you have your lists you need to come to terms with them.  Look at your "top priorities."  These things will be top-notch, exactly as you dreamed they would be.  These are the items you will spend most of your time one planning, and will turn out great.  As for the items on your "bottom priorities" list?  They'll get done, and they'll turn out well, but they won't be perfect (and that's ok!).

In my next post I'll share part of my priority lists and explain why each item was important to us.  I will also talk about how we emphasized or de-emphasized certain items in our WPP.  In the mean time, I'm curious to know what things that are the most important to you in planning your wedding?

Practical Tip: Setting the date

The purpose of this blog is not to talk about my wedding specifically, but I want to share some thoughts I have about how we set our wedding date and the effect it had on our WPP.  We got engaged in May 2011, and are getting married in April 2012.  We chose the month purely on personal preference (April isn't too hot, isn't too cold, and gave us an 11 month engagement, which seemed right for us, see below for more about that), but it turned out there were a ton of unexpected benefits that we didn't anticipate.  If you haven't yet set your date, I urge you to consider the following.

Prices

Since we're not getting married in prime wedding months, there are three words we grew to love.  off season discount.  We were able to negotiate on the contract with the venue, and found that prices were generally lower for off season months.  From what I've seen an off season wedding can save you 5-10% off the total cost of your wedding.

Availability
This was a HUGE deal for us.  Let's just say we're not exactly on the ball when it comes to booking our vendors and planning decor for the wedding.  Let's be honest, we fell off the ball months ago.  Compared to other engaged couples we are way behind in planning (Side Practical Tip: It's rarely helpful to compare your WPP with other engaged couples).  Most people had everything set months before the wedding.  But here we are, less than two months to go, with vendors yet to book.  And you know what?  So far it's worked out fine for us because we're not getting married in a super desirable month.  We were able to book a DJ three months before with no problem, and we've rarely, if ever, encountered a vendor that didn't have an availability on our date.  It is wonderful to not have to stress about finding a vendor ASAP and not being worried that they will get booked up before you can sign a contract.  I can't stress enough how this has helped us stay relatively zen-like.

Length of engagement
When I started college, I tried to be as diligent as possible in finishing assignments.  I would start on them as soon as they were assigned with plans to finish them early and then be able to relax as the due-date approached.  What would happen instead is that I would work all week, and still end up working until the last minute.  By senior year I got wise and waited until the last minute to even start.  I found I was able to finish assignments on time with the same quality as before!  Wow, why did it take me so long for me to learn this?!  It was then when I learned first hand that it's true: Work expands to the amount of time allotted to it.
If we had a 2 year engagement, it would take us 24 months to plan our wedding for sure.  That's 24 months of interviewing vendors, choosing decorations, and researching flowers.  That's way too long for me!  11 months of this shenanigans is plenty for me, thank you!

So there ya go, how a largely uninformed decision turned out to be exactly perfect for us and helped us on the road to Zen Wedding Planning.

Step 1: The Mindset

The stereotypical image of a bride-to-be in the media is a humorless frantic woman obsessed with color swatches, agonizing over fondant, and bossing all of her loved ones around in preparation for "her special day."  This does not have to be you!  Zen wedding planning begins with a mindset - an attitude towards the WPP that is low-key and upbeat.  This first step was difficult to describe, but I think I hit all the important parts below!

Perspective
The heart and soul of a wedding, the core, the very reason for it is because you are in love!  How wonderful and joyful is that?!  I think it's good to remind yourself of this as often as possible.  A wedding is not to impress people, or to make your single friends jealous, or to throw the party of a lifetime, or for any other reason than to celebrate your love and commit to your partner for life.  That should be the cornerstone of your WPP.

Humor & flexibility
Like many things in life, it is dangerous to take the WPP too seriously.  Doing so leads stress (both on you and your relationships with other people involved in the process), which in turn leads to unhappiness and frustration.  You will inevitably run into problems involving cost or availability of wedding related items and vendors.  And since weddings tend to be such emotional subjects, disagreements with your future spouse, friends, and family will almost certainly occur.  Try to keep a sense of humor about these things, and be open to compromise.


Prepare for Imperfection...
...and even learn to love it!  One word I would never use to describe myself is a perfectionist.  Don't get me wrong, I take great pride in my work.  But to me the time/perfection trade off is almost never worth it and I truly believe there is  great value in knowing when things are good enough.  Knowing when things are good enough can really save you a ton of time agonizing over small details just because you are caught up in the idea of things having to be perfect.  Plus, it is really liberating to be free of the expectation of perfection.  This is not to say you should do things half-assed, or not care about quality.  And for the things that are really important to you, striving for perfection can pay off.  But not every aspect of your wedding will be perfect.  And you know what?  I think it's better that way!

Ok, I think that's it!  The next steps will be less abstract and more tangible things that will help you with the WPP, so stay tuned!

Zen Wedding Planning

Hello, internet land.  I am currently a bride-to-be in the final stages of wedding planning who has managed to stay 98% sane through my wedding planning process (we'll talk about that remaining 2% at a later date).  There are a million wedding planning resources out there, a few of which I've actually found useful for inspiration or ideas (and countless ones that I found rather useless, to put it kindly), but I haven't found anything that gives real advice for real people on how to minimize freakouts and let you live your life while planning a wedding, which is what I aim to do here.



Between my fiance and me, we have two 40+ hour/week jobs, two long commutes, a dog to care for...and, oh yea -- friends and family that we like to see, hobbies we like to enjoy, and plenty other non-wedding related aspects of our life.  We are having an average size, vaguely traditional wedding, and didn't want planning it to become a part time job.  Now that our engagement is 80% over, I've isolated 5 main steps to our wedding planning process that have helped us stay sane while still planning a hopefully rockin' event:

1. Getting in the right mindset - entering the wedding planning process (WPP) with the right expectations

2. Prioritize - understanding what is important for you for your wedding

3. Organize - using the most effective tools to get shit done

4. Splurge - being impractical and indulgent on a few items that are important to you

5. Pace - focusing on a few tasks at once

In the upcoming posts I will explain what each of these things mean, why they were important to us, and how we achieved them.  I would also love to hear about other people's experience keeping their sanity while planning a wedding!

I guess this first post should also come with some caveats.  First, I don't claim to be some amazing wedding planner.  I think our wedding is going to be a sweet ceremony followed by an awesome party, but certainly nothing you would find featured in a style blog or Bridal magazine.  And that's fine with me (I'll expand on this in my next post).  I do claim to be able to plan (along with my fiance) a wedding without going nuts, and without having to drop everything else in your life to do so.

Second, my fiance and I still have a ton of planning to do.  I'm pretty sure we're in the single digits for number of weeks until our wedding, and we are still missing some semi-large pieces of the wedding puzzle.  For example, we don't have flowers.  Or a wedding offiant.  So, actually, it seems like I'm a pretty crummy wedding planner.

You should definitely follow this blog.  You will either get a ton of great advice on planning a wedding, or will be entertained as fiance and I crash and burn in the final weeks leading up to ours, followed by entertaining yet horrifying stories of what happens when you take on the WPP so arrogantly.