Do I need a wedding planner or a temporary personal assisstant?
August 14, 2015 5:16 PM   Subscribe

My life is full of wonderful stressful things, and I can't juggle all of them right now. I need help – I'm just not sure what kind of help I should be looking for, or where to look.

I'm getting married in a little more than six weeks. My fiancée and I have already pinned down most of the important stuff (location, catering, etc.), but of course there's still a long list of small and not-so-small stuff that we still need to take care of. My fiancée has a full-time office job, and thus has limited time to work on things. I work from home as a kind of freelance academic, with a variety of jobs:
• I am a consultant and editor at an academic research journal;
• I have a book contract, though the manuscript isn't due for another year after my wedding;
• I'm involved with a couple of grant proposals, which are not due until after my wedding, but which do determine a significant fraction of my future salary, so I can't let them slide entirely;
• and I also have a variety of smaller projects that are safely postponed until after the wedding.
In other words, I have the work profile of a junior research faculty member, but with no graduate students, no institutional support, and no administrative staff.

Anyhow, my professional obligations, the wedding planning, and the usual housework and paperwork of adulthood have definitely stretched me past my limits. I need help. But I don't really know how to get help. As far as I can tell, wedding planners offer two kinds of services: either they help you plan the wedding from the start, or they come in to coordinate on the day of the wedding. We need something in between – someone who will help us (especially me) juggle the variety of administrative and logistical crap between now and the wedding. Which leads me to the question in the title: maybe what I'm really looking for is some kind of temporary part-time personal assistant? I had been considering finding a part-time personal assistant anyhow if those grants come through — the amorphous boundaries of my job make it difficult for me to organize my work. (I also have a tendency to forget to stop working unless someone tells me, which leads to short-term burnout and a boom-bust cycle of work. I figured a good personal assistant might also be able to help me smooth that out to a more steady flow.) All that being said, though, I have no real idea of how to find a personal assistant. And I'm concerned that the search process might take up more time than it would save between now and the wedding.

Logistical details: I'm in the San Francisco Bay Area. I have some money to play with, but not much: at most, I might be able to scrape together a thousand or so to put toward this over the next two months. But I don't think I need too much of someone's time, either, so hopefully that's enough. I have no idea how taxes or paperwork would work on something like this, so any advice about that would be great too.

Thanks!
posted by freelanceastro to Work & Money (9 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
I would think a wedding organizer would work perfectly in this situation.
posted by heathrowga at 5:30 PM on August 14, 2015


Best answer: I agree. I was actually you last summer - book contract and all - and I got terribly behind in the two weeks before the wedding and ended up having to taskmaster my friends and family to get things done. I wouldn't do it that way again. Wedding planners/organizers can customize their services to meet your need. Just send your inquiry around to several and describe exactly what you need. It will honestly save you so much stress and strain (there will be enough agita already).

Oh, and get a day-of wedding coordinator. It's the one big thing I wish I'd done differently - I tried to make it through without one and ended up halfway trying to stage-direct my own wedding and worrying about how off track the timing was (which matters). Just assume that everyone around you is going to get massively distracted and be utterly unable to follow your timeline or execute the plan you had laid - including you. That's why you need the day-of coordinator.
posted by Miko at 6:02 PM on August 14, 2015


Absolutely get a wedding planner - and make sure they are good at day-of coordinating too. Offload all wedding tasks onto them. This person will be much easier to find and much more reliable than someone who will try to handle everything you can throw at them.

Then if you still feel overwhelmed, finding an assistant for your job will be simpler too. Maybe you can go through your school's student employment office?
posted by bleep at 6:37 PM on August 14, 2015


Best answer: I use a PA regularly. It takes some effort and time to get a PA running effectively for you. You need to be clear about how much decision-making authority this person has. If the tasks you have are really decision-making tasks then a PA -particularly a new PA - is probably not the way to go. Lots of task which look to be purely administrative on the surface actually require you to make a decision. That might be especially true of any final wedding details.

A wedding planner will probably work here. I'm not sure ramping up a new PA is going to be your best path forward, particularly if you haven't had someone do that type of work for you before.
posted by 26.2 at 7:24 PM on August 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


Best answer: We did exactly the thing you're looking for. We did not want a start-to-finish wedding planner, but we needed someone to work out the finicky stuff that we didn't want to deal with (renting tables and chairs, getting utensils, finding licensed bartenders, setting up the space, organizing delivery, ordering food, running interference) in the weeks/months leading up to the wedding.

Our person had a flat fee for the "day of" coordination and also had a reasonable hourly fee for other stuff (like what I've listed above). It was the best money we spent on our wedding.
posted by goodbyewaffles at 10:26 PM on August 14, 2015


Response by poster: OK, hearing it loud and clear — gonna get a wedding planner! Thanks everyone!
posted by freelanceastro at 10:42 PM on August 14, 2015


Response by poster: (Also, bleep, good call on finding a PA *after* the wedding if needed. That's probably what I'll do, though I can't go through my school's student employment office because I'm not at a school – I'm self-employed.)
posted by freelanceastro at 10:45 PM on August 14, 2015


Getting a cleaner for the next six weeks would probably help too. Much less to think about.
posted by tinkletown at 8:43 AM on August 15, 2015


From what I understand, a "day of coordinator" package usually includes the stuff about a month out.
posted by radioamy at 2:07 PM on August 15, 2015


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