Easy Party Planning with Google Sheets and Toodledo

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll share how I use Google Sheets and Toodledo to throw our annual party with a minimum of fuss.

I used to feel kind of intimidated about throwing a big party, but now I’ve got it down to a science.  We throw a big annual night-club themed dance party since we both love to dance and we’re too old and suburban now to go to actual night clubs.  Our party is NOT going to end up in a magazine spread, but it is easy to pull off year after year.  And I find that I can actually enjoy myself when I'm not being a slave to perfection.  Here are some of my requirements for our annual party:

• Large - I actually prefer large parties since I get stressed out about narrowing down the guest list for smaller parties.  I will definitely enjoy the party less if I’m worried about hurting people’s feelings.
• Easy - Hats off to people who seem to effortlessly throw beautiful, complicated parties with a lot of creative touches and homemade food.  I am NOT that person. The key for me is decorating just enough to get by and relying on pre-made food for convenience and ease.  It helps that we have the party start at 8pm, so we provide munchies, but not dinner.  And also, because it’s dark outside at that time, string lights go a long way in decorating. I leave the little hanging nails up all year round, so light hanging is easier starting in year 2. I also essentially get all of my food from Costco.  And I’m not afraid to serve some things out in the containers they came in. It’s not glamorous, but it does the trick. 
• Fun - just a couple of fun touches go a long way. Themes are great, particularly if you allow for folks to opt out of costumes. Not everything wants to be forced to wear 80s era prom gear, for example.  The dance club theme is perfect since the ladies tend to club it up and the men can really wear whatever they want -- which is basically accurate clubbing attire.  We are lucky enough to have an accomplished DJ as a good friend.  We have some other friends who let us use their parkay dance floor.  And I usually find something fun to hand out: glow sticks, blinky rings, etc. 
• Repeatable - I really don’t mind giving a LOT of thought to planning a party the first time I throw it. But I want to capitalize on all of that decision-making effort in the years that follow.  What that means for me is lots of documenting and a post-party review.  And in order to do this, I use

Google Sheets

I have a spreadsheet called Club Hammock Dance Party.  If you want to use this, just open it in Google Sheets, and make a copy to your own Google Drive.  This spreadsheet holds historic and current party information.  I have different sheets for different kinds of information and, generally speaking, if the information is 2-dimensional, meaning it can be contained in a single column, then I keep multiple years on one sheet. If the information has more than 2 dimensions, or multiple columns, then I have to duplicate the sheet for each year. I just name them with the year first. Let’s go through my sheets:

• Invites - this holds just names and email addresses. I use Evite and you can just cut and paste this entire column into the invite list on Evite. 
• Details - this holds other core information that I need to plug into the Evite — details like when, where, etc. This is an example of a 2-dimensional sheet, so I can keep info for multiple years on the same sheet.
• Food and Drink - this is a list of all of the food and drink and which serving platter I use.
• Decorations - this contains links to websites where I purchased decorations.  And descriptions of all of the decorations, where they are placed and any additional information that will make my life easier the second time around. Like for stringing lights, I note which end I start with and where I plug it in.
• Shopping - a list of the items I need to purchase, the quantity, what recipe they are used in, and what store they come from. When shopping, I turn the filter on so that I can filter by store.  To filter, select all of the cells and hit this filter button.  Now, under the store column I can select individual stores.
• Tasks - So, the first year I spent some time coming up with this list of tasks and now I just do the same thing every year.  Along with each task, I determined how many days before the event that task needs to happen. For example, I need to order the keg 7 days before the party. Then every year, the first thing I do is figure out the date for the party — I have an annually recurring task in Toodledo to figure that out well in advance.  Then, in this cell here in yellow, I plug in the date for this year and it updates all of the dates for each task for this year.  You can see there are a lot of tasks on the day of the party, obviously. I have an additional column where I can list the time the task should happen. For example, I need to put on the slow cooker meatballs at noon and pick up the keg at 1pm.  So, once I’ve updated this task list for the current year, I plug these tasks into my current task app — in my case, Toodledo.  

Toodledo

I do all of this on Toodledo for the web since it has more robust functionality. Basically, I want to add these tasks in bulk. I ignore all of the tasks that need to happen the day of the party, since I can just work off of the spreadsheet for those.  Instead, I copy this column of tasks from the spreadsheet, go to Toodledo, hit Add Task, choose Add Multiple Tasks and paste them in.  If each is on its own line, Toodledo will put each in as a separate task.  I tag them all with a tag like Annual Party and hit Save.  Now to change all of the dates, go into Tags, find the appropriate tag and then change each task date to reflect the dates on the spreadsheet.  If you'd like blow by blow instructions on entering multiple tasks in Toodledo, check out my video on Planning Big Projects.  

The last planning thing I do is go through and for any task that will take longer than 30 minutes, I block off time on my calendar for that day.  I basically clear the entire day of the party (with some kid activity exceptions) and also the morning of the day before the party for shopping.  

Look, no one is going to accuse me of being the next Martha Stewart -- perfection is not my goal.  I know my life and my stressors well enough to know that if an event is not easy and repeatable, it's ALSO not likely to happen every year.  I love this event for the sheer joy of connecting with friends and, of course, dancing like a lunatic.  Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!