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
Planning
A planning timeline that survives contact with reality
4 Jun 2026 · 6 min read
A planning timeline is not a countdown. It is a sequence of decisions, each of which unlocks the next. Book the venue and you have fixed the date, the capacity and roughly half the budget. Everything downstream becomes easier to decide because the constraints finally exist.
Work forwards from the first irreversible choice. Venue, then date, then guest count, then caterer. Only after those four does anything about design, stationery or music become worth deciding — before that you are guessing at a room you have not stood in.
Leave the last six weeks almost empty. That space will fill itself with the things nobody predicted: a supplier change, a seating rearrangement, a guest list that grew by nine. A timeline with no slack is a timeline that will be abandoned in its final month.
In the planner, a task with a past due date and no completion is marked overdue with a label as well as a colour, so it reads the same on a phone in bright sun as it does on a laptop at night.