Miss Coyote's Top Five

I am a list maker. I am also realllllly unorganized. Yep, my brain is constantly fighting with itself. This usually means that I have about 5 or 6 unfinished “to-do” lists laying around my home at any given time.

In fact, I just now wandered around and took inventory of all my lists. Here's what I found:

[Personal Photo]

My planner, 2 lists of work-related tasks that I need to complete, a grocery shopping list, a list of wedding tasks and a list of things to ask your bakery. Yikes!

I've started to organize the chaos by trimming down these lists to help me keep things in perspective.

I try to create lists of 5 - 10 things to do and I don't go over that. 5 things to clean today. 10 wedding things I want to accomplish this month and so on.

As we started wedding planning these lists became incredibly important. It was so easy to get bogged down in details and I needed to start small. 

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Yea, I feel like this way too often.

And so, with the hopes of trying to keep it real, here is my list of the top five things to start thinking about after you get engaged:

1. BUDGET! I'm sure you've all heard this before, but I really can't stress this enough. As intimidating as it is, figure out your wedding budget. I used the one at The Knot, but I know Project Wedding has a great one too. The list will also help you see things that you might not need (we are keeping ceremony décor simple and we don't have ring bearer or flower girl so we were easily able to cut our floral budget – score!!)

2. Guest list. Almost immediately after we announced our engagement we sat down with our parents and put together a preliminary guest list. Do you want an intimate affair with immediate family? Or a huge blowout with everyone you know? (We figure we're only going to do this once, so we're going with the blowout! Go big or home! Now hopefully this blowout won't blow up in our faces...)

3. Season. Is time of year important to you? For us, it was. We didn't immediately settle on a date, but we did ultimately decide that we wanted a summer wedding.

4. Venue. Yep, this is a biggie, but it's time to look for a place to wed. For us, once we settled on a venue everything else kind of fell into place. The venue determined the overall feel of our wedding and even though we aren't having a specific theme, a wedding at a winery, a theater or on the beach can help push you in the right direction.

5. Dress!! Haha okay, this is not really one of the first things you need to do, but I feel like some of those were really heavy things to tackle. Throw something fun in there! For us, it was a the photographer. I really, really loved drooling over wedding photos all day. For you, it might be the dress or maybe the cake. I know it doesn't always seem like it but.... Wedding plan CAN be fun, so enjoy yourself!

Are you a crazy list maker like I am? What were some of the first things you did after getting engaged?