I never thought I’d get my partner Joe to use Cardsmith. He has been nothing but supportive of me and the Cardsmith team. He MC’d our launch party, he’s the voice behind the getting started tutorial videos on our website, and he has done QA work for Cardsmith. And yet, he didn’t see a need to use Cardsmith, personally.
And then, we started to plan our wedding. We designed and planned our ceremony and reception collaboratively. We decided to ‘do it ourselves’ vs. hiring a wedding planner, or going with a one-stop-shop wedding venue.
We chose Mt. Tabor as our ceremony site. This is a very cool park in Portland, Oregon on top of an extinct volcano. We have a friend who is a chef at a local restaurant in Sellwood and they agreed to let us take over the entire restaurant, the outdoor patio, bar and backroom to use as a dance floor. This was really cool, but they don’t do many weddings there, and with the ceremony at a separate location 10 miles away, meant there were a lot of details. We had to figure out transportation for some elderly and handicapped guest. We had to plan for a sound system at the ceremony and the reception. And the list goes on…
In the early stages, Joe and I would get together weekly and we’d brainstorm ideas about the wedding. We used the Freeform board to put a sticky-note for each of our ideas and how we wanted the feeling of the wedding and party afterward to be. For example, some cards were titled: “Fun, carefree, and 100% us”, “Close friends and family”, “Party Games”, “Lots of laughter”. “Good food and wine over elaborate decorations or wedding favors”, “Music”.
We then went into research mode, and used Cardsmith to capture notes and links to various websites within the cards. For example, I had a venue card where I stored all the links to the various venues we were considering.
Soon though it became time to start making decisions and getting the work done. It was now April and we had 5 months remaining before our September 10th wedding. We created a Grid View and added column for each month remaining – April, May, June, July, August and September. We added milestone cards for key dates that were time sensitive – things like “Mail Invitations”, and then worked backwards from there. For example, if we were going to be able to send out invitations in June, we needed to have the ordered in May, and gosh…. We’d better get started on the design now! We front loaded the tasks that required input from other people. Things like Flowers, Rings, and a DJ needed to be decided on and booked.
Each Sunday, Joe and I would meet over the Cardsmith board, adding cards for tasks that we just thought about, checking off cards that were completed the week before by each of us, and then splitting up the tasks to be completed in the upcoming week. It truly made the process enjoyable, and we would do this over our Sunday morning coffee. Using our (beta) Iphone app, Joe would update the cards he was working on during the week and would then use the Board comments feature to notify me of his progress. He loved putting a check mark on the cards that he completed.
It is September 1st now, and we are one week away. We found that once we got into August, we had more tasks, but each task was smaller. So, we decided to split August into two columns – 1st half and 2nd half. For the few days before the wedding, we have daily columns. We even added a column at the end called ‘Pack for Honeymoon’. It is super cool that we can so easily add, rename and even hide columns in the board to keep our focus on the current week’s tasks.
Here’s a picture of our wedding plan ‘sticky note’ board.
We are almost there!
Here are the last minute tasks… as seen in the iPhone app (beta) view:
(and yes, I know Ceremony is spelled wrong, but Joe thinks my lack of spelling skills is so funny, I decided to leave it as Cremony). Whatever brings laughter and joy! And, Cardsmith certainly has helped make the wedding planning process much more fun!