With the current Stay Home initiatives/mandates in many states in response to the Coronavirus, the tasks you can do for wedding planning are very limited.  Therefore, working on the “paperwork” aspect of your day seems ideal.  Nothing like curling up with on your couch with a romcom and the task of creating your wedding day timeline.   As you are working on your timeline, we want to provider a few pros and cons for adding buffer times:

Personally, we believe adding buffer times to your wedding day is extremely beneficial on so many levels and would be a total no brainer.  However, this idea of adding or how to add extra time might not come as naturally to you.  So, to help out, we’ve put together 4 simple ways to build in some buffer time!

1. Round up your travel or commute times!  One key component of determining the flow of your day, is figuring out how long it will take you to get to each location (especially when you have more than 2 spots).  As your figuring out the how long you will need to travel, simply add a few round up the time and add some extra time (especially since you never know what traffic will be like on your actual wedding day).   For example, if your GPS says it will take 20 minutes to get from your hotel room to the church, make that 30 at a minimum.   So, if it takes you a good 5 minutes to get in the car, you still running on schedule!
2. The 10 minute rule!  When adding time to your timeline, we suggest at least adding an extra 10 minutes.  It doesn’t seem like a ton of time, but an extra 10 minutes multiple times throughout your day will add up.  We have found adding only 10 minutes will help keep things on schedule.  Yes there may be parts of your day that gets behind 15 or 20 minutes, but there may be other parts of the day that are ahead of schedule… so at the end of the day, this everything equals out and stay right on schedule!
3. Pre-Ceremony Break!  As you see we stated above, our rule of thumb is to add 10 mins here and there throughout the day, but we also suggest at least one break of 30-45 minutes.  Why you may wonder.  Honestly the day is so fast paced and non-stop, just having a set break will do everyone some good!   Time to just sit down and freshen up for round 2.  Not to mention, it’s a great time to have a large block of time incase anything major happens and we all need a little more time for getting the images you’ve dream of! 
4. Time your Trials!  Part of the wedding planning process is doing hair and make-up trials to see if you love the look.   However, these trials will hold very important information to assist on your big day, the amount of time it will take to complete.  Your stylist may give you an estimate but knowing how long it will actually take is very important.  As you’re planning what time to start, we would recommend starting earlier than you think.  On the actual wedding day, things may get behind or someone may run late, so it’s best to add in some wiggle room.  Worst case scenario, you’ll finish earlier than expected! 

Gifting yourself time upfront save so much un-needed stress on your actual wedding day!  It is inevitable at one point or another, the timeline will get behind.  When this happens, having minutes to spare along the way will help keep the day moving along smoothly!  Can you want anything more than a stress free and smooth wedding day?!

Happy Planning,

Nicole & Ryan