Planning
A planning timeline that survives contact with reality
Most timelines fail because they are written backwards from the day instead of forwards from the first decision.
4 Jun 2026 · 6 min read
Guests
The guest list is the budget
8 May 2026 · 4 min read
Catering, seating, transport, favours, stationery and staffing all scale with headcount. Change the guest list by thirty people and you have changed roughly a third of the budget without touching a single design decision.
Build the list in households rather than individuals. It halves the number of decisions, matches how invitations are actually sent, and makes plus-one questions resolve themselves.
Decide the plus-one rule once, write it down, and apply it without exception. Every exception costs two more conversations than the invitation was worth.
Gather tracks confirmed guests and plus-ones as a single attending figure against your capacity, so the number you see is the number the caterer will cook for.