This may not seem like a post about wedding design.  But hear me out: Organization and Design are like twin sisters - they look a little different, but they come from the same gene pool.

It starts with office supplies.  At the beginning of each school year, I loved going school shopping.  Not for the new clothes, but for the paper clips. (For you gals that feel me, how awesome was that Back-to-School themed wedding that circulated the web a few months back?) So, choosing a wedding planner was something I anticipated almost as much as choosing a dress. Yay!

But then I got to the bookstore.  And to the online stores.  And to the specialty stores. And to the Bridal Shops.

It wasn’t so much that the planners weren’t good – they all had exceptional features. I was just overwhelmed by the number of planners I’d have to buy in order to get the features I truly wanted.  With all the productivity gadgets and methods on the web, you’d think we’d have found one that catered to the-most-important-party-of-one’s-life, right?

Wrong.  Though there are sooo many apps and books out there designed to help a Bride plan, few are intended to actually help her get from plan to actually doing stuff.  I’ve heard some really good recommendations on tweaking available options and some even better suggestions on creating unavailable options, but in the meantime, I’ve created my own little system.  I used methods that were invented for other purposes.  And I actually had so much fun putting it all together.  I present in this post Kate’s-Exception-Wedding-Planning-System! I hope it helps with your planning and gives you that giddy feeling I got when I went shopping for paperclips.

Or not. *wink*

I started with Microsoft’s OneNote.  Delicious little notetaking device.  Here is a screenshot:

A few things to observe in the picture

1. Clipping a photo from the web is very easy.  Then I have it for future reference.
2. Making notes about that clip is as easy as landing your cursor on the page and beginning to type.  Multiple notes are easy too, because you can just type anywhere on the page.
3. The sections at the top are the sections by which I referenced things again – a picture of a dress went in the section labeled ‘Bride’ and so on.
4. I could also drag and drop between these sections, so when it came time to make final decisions, I could easily remove unwanted pages without deleting them forever.

OneNote was a gem during a time where people were handing me suggestions left and right.  I made tables with lists of vendors to call, I could take notes about those vendors right there in the page, and then, I could easily add pictures (clipping from the web or scanning a document and adding to a page.)  All my ideas in one source.

The next element of my Kate’s-Exceptional-Wedding-Planning-System was a book called Getting Things Done, by David Allen.   Though this is not a book about weddings, it ought to be standard issue with every engagement ring.  Allen’s approach is simple and clear.  The method challenges complexity and boils down to a few basic principles.  He even lists a very natural cycle for planning.  The moment I got to that chapter, I thought ‘Why has the corporate world been hogging this method? I’ve needed this information from the moment my fiance proposed!’

According to GTD, I shouldn’t keep everything in my head.  The moment a thought occurs to me, I record it.  I should also record it in a place where I will look again. Simple, yes?  It gets even better.  A place where I record a thought or task is called an Inbox (easy to remember) and I should have as few Inboxes as possible, so as not to get confused by the overwhelming amount of information in my life.

This system plugged in nicely with my planning phase.  I began to review all the information I’d collected for tasks.  Not just nebulous ‘find a dress’ sorts of things, but actual concrete ‘Call this list of dressmakers for fabric options’ tasks.  Isn’t that a marvelous difference?  Instead of staring at bunch of clippings and wondering how in the world I was going to implement them, I now had a task list! Hooray!

I’m a very computer-oriented person when working with planning, but I need paper when I’m task-listing.   I knew that OneNote would continue to be a good reference spot.  I needed a good paper system now to track my to-dos.  (OneNote does have an EXCELLENT to-do list function that I highly recommend.  There are also some wonderful task apps online…) In search of a good paper method, I received inspiration.

I got out my stack of index cards.  All colors and fun.  I put together a simple color coding system (White for the Bride, Green for Vendors, Purple for the Attendants, etc.) and then began recording tasks on those little cards.  One task per card.     This one task per card yielded a big pile of cards. But then I began sorting and working with each card.  The features of the cards were evident right away.

1. I could take notes on each card about that task.  Measurements or questions I wanted to remember, etc.
2. Once complete, I could review a card to see if further tasks were needed and list the follow-up tasks either on that card with the notes, or fresh, separate cards (so as not to distract myself)
3. Another nice completion point: the more I completed, the smaller my pile got.  Instant motivation!

I purchased a cute little index card sorter from Target (The Container Store also has some super cute options) and plugged in all elements by having a few reference cards up front that listed GTD methods and some things gleaned from my OneNote materials. Voila!  Wedding planner that was both light to carry and easy to sort through.  Since I already used my phone for contacts and calendar, I just used a subsection called ‘Wedding’ for everything there and continued using that successful system in conjunction with the index cards.

In hindsight, I wish I’d known my computer/planning vs. paper/todos quirk before starting this whole venture.  It took a few tries on the computer before figuring out that I just couldn’t track everything.

I’d love to read comments and suggestions about how others have organized their planning.

In the meantime, I’m gonna go GWTD.  *grin*