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Wedding and Event Planning with RTM

matthewtcline says:

My fiancée and I have begun our wedding planning and have found Remember the Milk to be a great tool to help us prepare!

We created one list for all of our wedding details and called this list "OurWedding" and shared this between each other, our parents, and everyone else who is helping us making wedding decisions.

Now, we are in the process of adding each relevant item to the list and using tags to signify the different aspects of planning. For instance, when we add a potential wedding photographer, we tag it "photographer". We also add a link to the photographer's web site and put any other relevant information in the notes. Once we have reviewed the photographer's work, we change the priority based on whether we liked the photographer or not. 1=favorites 2=suitable, but not ideal 3=last resort. On the ones we definitely don't want, we just delete and send them a kind message explaining we have chosen a different photographer.

We may vary this slightly for each wedding aspect, but we add everything to this main list including all of the wedding vendors, the guests, the locations, the registry, etc. This way, it is easy to share this one list with everyone who is helping us plan.

The final step is one of the most important. As we add everything to the list, it quickly becomes clustered together. So, we use Smart Lists to sort by tag. We make a separate Smart List for each of the wedding vendors, a guest list, a registry list, etc. That way, we can easily access just the information that we need at the time. It would probably work just as well to make a separate list for each item and skip the need for Smart Lists, but this seemed like the better solution to us for easy sharing and consolidation.

We have found this method of planning so productive that we intend to use this for all of the big events we plan in the future!

Posted at 8:19pm on February 10, 2010

matthewtcline says:

One thing that I forgot to mention is that we also came up with a unique way to account for the number of guests. We didn't want to have to enter each guest individually. A guest list usually just includes one person for each family and a +1, +2, +3, etc next to the name for the rest of the family members. For this, we are using the time estimate feature and adding one minute for each guest of the family.

For example, say we are inviting John Smith, his wife, and his 2 children. We add a task named "John Smith +3", tag it with "guests", and give it a time value of "4 mins". If, for instance, Sally Jones is coming alone, we would put her name without any "+"s after it and give her a time value of "1 min".

This way, when we look at the Smart List for wedding guests, we can look at the time value and see the total number guests, including members of the family.

Note: RTM automatically converts each 60mins to an hour. So, if you have more than 60 guests, you will need to do some simple math to come up with the total. Just multiply the hours by 60 and add the remaining minutes.

It would be nice if RTM converted the time estimate feature into a general calculator feature. Ideally, it would still show time if a time value is entered, but it could also calculate anything else if you label it with something other than minute, hour, day, week, etc. Just a thought. =)

Posted 1 year ago

organisator says:

Thats interesting. So am I right, that you do not use it for tasks, but for collection information?

What about the guest that cannot or do not want to use RTM?

And wouldn`t it be easier to use a public file, like a google sheet?

Posted 1 year ago

matthewtcline says:

Good questions, organisator. I forgot to mention it, but we actually do use it for wedding tasks, too. We simply add a tag such as "tasks" or "ceremony_tasks" to the main list and then create a Smart List just for the tasks.

This isn't for something we need (or even want) public access to. It is just for a very small handful of people who are helping to plan our wedding, most of whom already had an RTM account or had no problem creating one.

The main reasons we found this more appealing than a spreadsheet were the abilities to organize and sort our data (by seeing it all at once or hiding only certain elements), color code it with priorities, and keep track of numbers more simply (as I explained with the time estimate). Spreadsheets can be great tools, but it is easy to get lost in the data and feel like everything is disconnected (especially if it is separated into different sections or sheets within a document). Using RTM allows us to streamline the lists so that we only see only what we need to see and easily sort and organize the information in that particular category.

Posted 1 year ago

benb Pro says:

I like the idea of using the time estimate for guests.
If you didn't want to do maths in your head, you could set it as 1 day per guest - RTM doesn't do any further calculations, so you might end up with 628 days (if you were very popular!!)

Congratulations BTW.

Posted 1 year ago

matthewtcline says:

Thanks, benb! That's very helpful. I was wondering that when I set it up, but I only tried minutes and hours. I should have kept going!

Posted 1 year ago

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