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How to Save Hours on Your Wedding Day Timelines
Let’s be honest, creating timelines isn’t the most fun part of being a wedding planner. It’s better to be out getting your bride down the aisle or designing a fabulous event than to be toiling over timelines and schedules.
Sure, timelines are an essential part of the planning process, and you have to do them. But most planners (even the ones who are amazing at logistics and organization) are spending more time on their timelines than is necessary, and I’d like to help fix that.
I’ve spent the last two and a half years doing research on the best ways to create wedding timelines. I’ve interviewed over 100 successful wedding planners throughout the country, diagramming their workflows and studying their timelines. And through my research, I’ve discovered some common time traps that planners fall into and some ways to avoid these time traps.
Top 5 Reasons Planners Lose Hours Doing Timelines
Based on my research, here are the top 5 reasons planners spend unnecessary hours on their timelines. Are you doing any of these things?
1) Needlessly recreating the vendor contact section for every wedding
Precious time can be lost when you’re adding the vendor contact information to your timelines. You can find yourself digging through old timelines and searching online to find vendor email addresses and phone numbers and then typing that information into each new timeline. It’s not a quick or easy process.
2) Changing a bunch of times one by one
Another common time trap occurs when you have to change the times for many items. For example, if the first look photos get shifted 30 minutes ahead and then every other timeline item has to also be shifted by 30 minutes. When you make these changes one by one, it costs time. And it increases the chances that you’ll make a mistake.
3) Creating tailored timelines for vendors
It’s a nice, professional touch to give vendors a tailored timeline that shows just the items directly involving them. But it can take a lot of time to create these tailored timelines and to update them every time the master timeline changes.
4) Creating and updating the wedding party timeline
Most planners create a shortened version of the timeline for the wedding party. This way the client can see just the items involving them. But it takes extra time to create a separate wedding party timeline and to keep it in sync with the master timeline.
5) Adapting the starting template
The starting template for a timeline never has all the correct information already in place. You need to add the right vendors and venues and to update the bride and groom names. You also have to change the dates, the religious tradition, and ceremony and reception times. All these edits take time. And again, there’s a real risk of making a mistake.
How to Avoid the Time Traps
Since your time is precious, the key question is, “How do you avoid these time traps?” The ideal way to avoid them is to create your timelines using a tool specifically designed for the job. That’s logical, right?
An ideal tool for doing wedding timelines would be smart enough to save your vendor contacts and then create your vendor contacts section for you. This ideal tool would also be sophisticated enough to understand the complex relationship between the items on the timeline and to know which venues and vendors are involved in which items.
And here’s the good news… The ideal tool that I just described actually exists! It’s called Timeline Genius, and you can learn all about it at TimelineGenius.com. Simply put, Timeline Genius is an online software that makes it easy for you to create awesome, totally customizable timelines.
If you really want to create professional timelines with no stress, Timeline Genius is the way to go. But what if you want to keep using Word or Excel for your timelines? In that case, I have some tips for you:
1) Save all of your vendor, venue, and client contacts in a Google Doc
This will give you a centralized way to manage your contacts. And since Google Docs are web based, your whole team can have real-time access to the information (if you want). Moreover, you can use the Google Drive mobile app to access all of your contacts on your smartphone.
2) Create an organized, strategic set of timeline templates
You can greatly reduce the amount of timeline editing you do if you start with a template that’s well adapted to your event. Let’s say you’re doing a Catholic wedding, with no first look and an evening ceremony, where the ceremony and reception venues are the same. You’ll save time if you have a template specifically for that scenario. More broadly, you could analyze your key, commonly occurring wedding scenarios and then create a great template for each one. The Wedding Planner’s Toolbox is a great tool to purchase timeline templates.
The above suggestions may take some time to implement, but just think of how valuable it would be if you could save hours on all your timelines over the life of your company!
And if the idea of creating a system of templates and saved contacts sounds overwhelming, I would encourage you again to check out Timeline Genius. It’s a powerful, easy-to-use tool for doing timelines, and we’re offering a special deal for members of the Planners Lounge community. For more information about Timeline Genius and to read the full findings of my years of timeline research, go to TimelineGenius.com.
This is a sponsored post from Eddie Babbage. Eddie is the founder and CEO of Timeline Genius, a software company dedicated to helping wedding planners create professional timelines with ease.
A complete set of templates, checklists, and tools for professional wedding planners.
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