"This Can Be Done Better"
If I had to describe myself with just one phrase, it would probably be: “This can be done better."
Not because I'm constantly unhappy with things (quite the opposite, actually). I just really enjoy making things work better. Give me a messy process, three different apps that don't quite talk to each other, or a workflow with too many unnecessary steps, and I'll happily spend an evening trying to figure out how to improve it, while being very excited about each small decision.
It's probably one of the reasons I enjoyed my previous corporate job so much. My favorite projects were never the ones where everything was already working perfectly. I liked the complicated ones, where you had to untangle a problem, understand why something was happening, and then build a better solution.
Funny enough, that's exactly what I love about wedding planning, too. People often think this job is mostly flowers, Pinterest boards, and pretty tablescapes. There is plenty of that, of course, but behind every wedding is a mountain of logistics: timelines, checklists, reminders, spreadsheets, automations, vendor communications, and that's the part that makes my brain happy.
Lately I've been thinking a lot about one particular problem. My current task management system is... let's call it "functional chaos."
All of my personal tasks, plus about half of my work, live in Google Calendar. I've been using it for years, it syncs with everything, it's where we schedule consultations, meetings, and our personal lives, doctor’s appointments, school concerts, and everything else. The other half of my work lives in HoneyBook, and for a very good reason: its automations are splendid. I don't have to remember what comes next because the system remembers for me.
If Google Calendar had that kind of automation and let me organize tasks a little better, I'd probably never look at another app again. Plus, I would really enjoy an ability to color-code my tasks.
There’s also Notion, which I am a huge fan of. They've been making some really interesting updates lately, especially with their calendar. In theory, I could build one database that holds absolutely everything. Personal tasks. Wedding tasks. Business projects. Recurring reminders. Long-term goals. Then I could display everything in one calendar and slowly recreate the HoneyBook automations there as well.
The idea of having one place for my entire life is incredibly tempting. but the problem is that this isn't the kind of project you finish over a weekend. It's probably two weeks of moving things around, testing automations, fixing mistakes, realizing something broke, fixing it again, and hoping I didn't accidentally remove an important reminder for one of our couples somewhere along the way. In other words, I'm not touching it right now, in the middle of the wedding season. Things are working. They may not be perfect, but they're reliable, and I have learned that reliability beats optimization when you're serving real people.
Once wedding season slows down and the Oregon rain comes back, I'll probably make a giant cup of tea, open Notion, and disappear into workflow-building mode for a couple of weeks.
