Andy's Idea Factory

UPDATED!!  I should have posted this sooner - but it took me a while to really commit to these planners on a daily basis for the full 90 days!!  My latest review for the 90x Planner by Alon David: I have been using the 90x planners for a couple of years now but hadn't ordered the Action Planner until now and LOVE the compactness of it! I struggled to fill the pages of the bigger planner some days (although when I did I found the intentional activity powerful!) and I also travel a lot for work, so It's nice to have the Action Planner with me always to stay focused on the goals at hand!  I also have used a LOT of planners, I tried the Panda planner, Erin Condren, Brendan Burchard's, Franklin Covey, and others (see below)... but nothing hones me in on my goals, bringing me back to focus on them weekly, staying on task with them monthly, and ticking down the 90 days like champ more than the 90x planner does! THANKS Alon!! This book has been a game changer for me!  If I c...

This was one topic I struggled with for sure... table cloths and color accents? Window decor with light catchers? Hanging lamps or additional lighting? Chair covers? Flowers on the table, tall or short? Placecard colors and font? OMG! It was overwhelming once we'd decided on our location because the options were limitless and we didn't have a wedding planner to help make those decisions. Personally, I'm more of a simple person, and our budget wasn't limitless (as most people's aren't) so I struggled between wanting to make it beautiful and frankly not giving a damn. :) So I met myself somewhere in between, and I think so should you... GENERAL DECOR First, go back to your colors. What are your bridesmaids wearing, what colors did you choose for flowers, or what are your favorite colors in general? Typically those snappy wedding experts say to stick with only 2-3 colors, unless you want it to look like a circus, and marry (excuse the pun) those colors with you...

Last week we started a Wedding Season 101 series of helpful hints for brides-to-be. We got married in 2006 and spent an entire year preparing. These tips are just my helpful hints that we discovered along the way for those of you who aren't enlisting the help of a wedding planner. This week I've got two more ideas for you for the wedding-day party favors. We'd been to over twenty weddings before we got married ourselves, five or six just in the 18 months between our engagement and the I-Dos, so we gathered a good deal of ideas to sort through before we came up with our own. We'd seen rice sachets, seed packets, music cds, and beer cozies, and wanted to give something that people would definitely use but would still remember our wedding by without necessarily being reminded of it with the cheesy text "Andy and Craig's wedding day" on it. We wound up compromising. 1. First was my mother's great idea from her knitting closet. She wanted to give the ...

As wedding season approaches and my wedding industry friends begin to hustle and bustle, I thought to share some of the Idea Factory lightbulbs from our own wedding in 2006. This will be a multi-part series of four topics: Prep, Gifts, Decor, and Honeymoon. Today's topic, PREP, is to help you get organized. Wedding planning is a long process with many facets, and doing it all on your own is daunting, so enlisting a good team and organizing your process is vital. We didn't enlist a wedding planner, but these tips can help you help your wedding planner too if you get one. Aside from the heavy duty first decisions like size, venue, band, and dress, you're going to have some smaller decisions that are just as important. There aren't many tricks to buckling down and making these decisions, so helping get the little ones sorted first will ease your mind. Here are three ideas to start... 1. Once you decide a location, you should send out your Save-The-Dates. We struggled ...