Original post author: Ryan
Weddings are complicated, and planning them is hard to do.
This is something Jessica and I learned when we planned our first wedding, which was supposed to be in June 2020. The COVID pandemic canceled that plan, so we ended up planning an entirely different wedding for October 2021. Both of these weddings required a lot of hands-on planning because they were at restaurants (which don’t really have “canned” wedding execution plans like other more well-established venues).
In the engineering world, when you’re coordinating a large project where many people must collaborate to produce a single unified outcome, versioned documents and drawings are used to keep everyone aligned. For example, to make a building, you need construction drawings and construction specifications. For our wedding in 2022, we chose to adopt this idea and apply it to our wedding.
We ended up making a 27-page Wedding Specification, which was shared in-full with all people with a role in the wedding. It had sections with contact info, timelines, set-up, tear-down, music, photography, and everything in between. The document covered the entire weekend, including Friday and Sunday activities. We had a few separate documents that were shared with a more exclusive group of people; for example, we only shared the script for our ceremony with people directly involved in the ceremony so it could still feel special to others.
We got a lot of positive feedback on the spec, especially from our vendors who seem to constantly be hungry for more information from their clients. They liked being able to see the big picture. And our spec seemed to have done a good job at providing that information because Jessica and I were only contacted only once during the wedding set-up with a question (which honestly was already answered in the spec).
We’ll admit that writing the document in construction specification format was tongue-in-cheek, but we still recommend anyone planning a wedding makes a similar document! It saved us time in the long run, and it contributed to a well-executed wedding. It definitely reduced our stress knowing that all of our wedding contributors would be able to collaborate without us, and the spec is what allowed that to happen.
Comet Catch-up! This post is related to something that happened in 2021. I took an unplanned 16-month hiatus from blogging, and these Comet Catch-up posts cover some of the things that happened in my life during that time. Thanks for reading!