Wedding season survival mode activated
You don’t need to be doing five weddings a week to feel the extra pressure that wedding season can bring. With so many responsibilities and commitments in both personal and work lives, even just a couple of extra ceremonies in a month can be enough to throw your regularly scheduled programming out of whack.
Of course, the best way to tackle wedding season overwhelm is to prevent it by being organised and taking care of your physical and mental health. Roxy’s article on how to stay healthy during wedding season provides some excellent insights on this.
But let’s face it, sometimes you are already drowning in meetings and unanswered emails and ceremonies waiting to be written. By then, the time for carefully planned self-care has long since passed. The following tips are for exactly this. They aren’t meant to be long-term strategies. They are simply just enough to keep you treading water until you have the time and energy to start swimming again.
Here are three key concepts to help get you through wedding season with your sanity still intact.
1. MVP (Minimum Viable Product )
In the world of software development, there’s something called MVP aka Minimum Viable Product. It means identifying the bare minimum features required to make a product usable before launch, while all the ‘nice to haves’ can be added later.
You can apply the same philosophy to your celebrancy practice when you’re swamped. Ask yourself, “What MUST be done to keep my business going?” and focus solely on that.
Start by deprioritising any emails or messages that don’t require immediate attention, even if you think “oh, it’ll only take 10 minutes” – NO! Those 10-minute increments add up quickly.
Consider activating an out-of-office message explaining that you may take a few extra days than normal before replying to non-urgent emails.
Maybe you can let your social media accounts take a backseat for a few weeks, or postpone any noncritical meetings until things are a little quieter.
Are your couple’s stories taking a lot of time to write? Make them shorter. No one is going to know that you only read out 500 words instead of your usual 1000.
This is also your permission to let some life maintenance stuff slide. I promise the world won’t fall apart if the clean laundry sits in the washing basket for a few days instead of being put away.
Basically, anything that isn’t absolutely essential to be done RIGHT NOW can be a “future you” problem. (And if “future you” gets upset about this, feel free to tell them that I said it was ok).
2. Outsource what you can
Being a celebrant is so often a one-person show. But when things are getting hectic, it’s time to call on a little help from your friends.
It’s not “cheating” to get assistance at work or at home. It’s about delegating so you can better spend your most valuable resource – your time – in the places where it will be most effective.
In a perfect world, you would already have a beautifully set-up CRM to automate tasks, or you’ve hired and trained a virtual assistant to take care of the day-to-day. But when it’s too late to have these more permanent resources in place, here are some short-term outsourcing ideas so you can focus on getting work done.
- Use AI tools such as ChatGPT or Goblin Tools to create shortcuts for writing ceremonies or to jump-start your inspiration
- Contract a celebrant ghost writer to write the couple’s story or even the whole script
- Hand over the sole responsibility of “household project manager” to your partner, so they can be in charge of all the bills, meal planning and chore division
- Let Uber Eats take care of dinner and/or grocery shopping
- Organise a babysitter or sweet-talk the grandparents into looking after little ones for a few hours so you can have some uninterrupted work time
- Hire the teenager next door to walk your dog for a week
Every little bit of help counts when you are in the thick of wedding season.
3. Prioritise sleep
Ok, so I know this sounds suspiciously like that time-consuming self-care that I mentioned earlier, but while you might not have time for a mani-pedi right now, some self-care is still required to get you through the season.
You should never underestimate the power of a good night’s sleep. Without adequate rest, you won’t be as productive and you’ll actually end up wasting time. Whether you’re an early bird, a night owl, or a lunchtime bin chicken, figure out what time of day you hit peak creativity and work your sleep schedule around that.
It’s also important to avoid any sleep thiefs whenever possible. I don’t mean shipping the kids off to boarding school, but keeping away from little things that you know will sabotage your strict pre-set bedtime. Watch repeats of comforting sitcoms instead of the bingeable new drama; write down your to-do list instead of allowing it to swim around in your brain; and charge your phone in the kitchen so you aren’t tempted to fall into a TikTok hole in bed.
The Upside
Wedding season can be a roller coaster of emotions and stress, but it’s also the time to bask in the lovefest and celebrate the privilege of having the best job in the world. So when you are beginning to feel overwhelmed, think “MVP! Outsource! Sleep!” to navigate the chaos, and come out the other side with your wellbeing and passion intact.
Deep breath. You’ve got this!
