Julie and I are married! We had our wedding a few weeks ago here in the Bay Area, and we had a fantastic time. It’s hard to imagine what could go wrong surrounded by friends and family to celebrate, but regardless, we were glad that all of our plans came together so well.
On our honeymoon, we spent a lot of time talking about the experience and musing about what we would do differently for that 2nd time that presumably will never come to pass. Amongst the tons of internet advice available on how to plan a wedding, we came up with a list of a few things that we thought went particularly well or poorly.
As such, this particularly post has been written in long discussion with Julie who deserves credit for the good ideas here.
1. Use Asana and Google Drive.
We dumped proposals, contracts, guests lists, and plenty more into Google Drive to share with our parents. Having a single place to use as reference and share the schedule avoided a lot of back-and-forth and confusion.
Longtime blog readers know my obsession with task management systems, and I definitely wanted it for wedding planning, too. We started with an empty Asana project, brain dumped tasks, never *cough* forget to do something.
2. Check in on your hotel blocks.
When we booked our hotel blocks, the hotel staff had standard block sizes for us with the understanding that it would be adjusted as necessary. Around the wedding, I found out from guests that the hotel where we were holding most peripheral events was apparently booked up, and we had no idea. In retrospect, we should have either checked in directly with the staff or tried booking ourselves.
3. Test out your wedding dress for dancing.
Julie and I hadn’t danced together in the full get-up until about a half-hour before our first dance. This wasn’t a big deal for me, but it was a big deal for Julie. I would recommend increasing that lead time by several orders of magnitude to avoid embarrassing accidents. Specifically, Julie would have tried walking backwards in her wedding dress during shopping and tailoring.
4. Put your guests in touch ahead of time.
For cliques of friends or family, it’s helpful to plan logistics around transportation and lodging if they know who else will be attending. It can be somewhat awkward for potential guests to ask directly (and accidentally inquire a non-invitee), so I just made a big email list and included everyone on it. I thought all of the social events surrounding the wedding went well and was glad to support that in any way possible.
5. Get lots of sleep before the wedding.
The wedding day itself is long, but even before that, we had plenty of guests coming through with whom we wanted to spend as much time as possible. The casualty of all of the excitement, of course, was sleep. The final 2 weeks before the wedding kept us up late with planning, and that time should have literally been work, plan, and sleep with everything else cut out to make more time for those.
6. Plan the cake cutting.
Through almost the entire wedding, we knew what would happen, but even more importantly, we had someone else specifically cueing or directing us on what we needed to do. The one gap was cake cutting: we went over to cut the cake, and suddenly, everyone was looking at us, and we were just supposed to do it. It was not hard, but it was a surprise after following instructions all day. It’s hard to practice, and we should have had a plan there.
7. Direct the DJ.
We are very fortunate to have very enthusiastic dancers amongst our friends and family, but not everything is going to work for the crowd. When the dancing was dying down, Julie told the DJ to “play stuff that people know”, and that re-invigorated the crowd.
8. Step back for a moment and take in the wedding.
One of Julie’s cousins gave us this advice during the wedding, and I wish I had followed it. Once I started getting dressed for the wedding, things never really stopped until Julie and I got in the car and drove away. Having everyone gathered together for us was a awe-inspiring thought, but we were so caught up in the action that I don’t think I ever really took it in. That would have been worth the 30 seconds to hang onto that feeling forever.