Originally posted by jordanyosh
Akira,
My cousin, Wendy, and I are emailing back and forth even as I am writing this post. We are planning to meet tonight and go over our 3rd draft of the itinerary. I saw your spreadsheet when you originally posted it. I am toying with doing one for our large group.....I think it would be helpful with 13 folks staying in different rooms at the BWV. What do you think? How does a spreadsheet benefit you in your planning?
I think it helps out a lot. This year I'm doing the planning for myself and my wife and also for my sister and brother in-law. They are meeting us for 6 of the days while we will be there. We are doing dinners and shows, etc together.
So I was "voluntiered" by the group to plan this hole trip for everyone.
I use a few different techniques to help in the planning. The best way I found so far is the calandar grid (
Excel Sheet Example ). This shows at an instant what's up for the day/week, and where your PS/Others are scheduled, and the time you have to do thers things or get to a PS.
After we figure out what we want to do, I then try to keep things together so we're not park hopping to much and wasting time. So if we are doing a tour in the morning at Epcot, I'll plan a PS that night at Epcot, so we'll just stay there all day.
A good example is the Thurday or Friday on the sheet. Thurday we stay withing the Epcot are the whole day, Friday we have Epcot in the morning, but I put the MK PS that night, then we just melt on into MNSSHP after dinner.
As you can see, I timeblock (and color code
) how much time I think we will be spending at each item, so know I know if there will be time conflicts.
But you can easily see there is still alot of unschedualed time everyday, plus I've over estimated (padded) the times for the PS's a bit, so there is probebly more time that it really show that is open.
Wow, 13 people. Can't even think how much time I'd be spending on something like that! :lol:
But seriously, you can use this idea to plan out group things, so others know what times to leave open if you are doing things speratly.
If you are all doing things together, then you can use this technique the same way. All of the PS except one are for 4 people. I got the room confirmation number from the in-laws, so I when I called to schedule stuff like tours and such, I gave them both our numbers. So I became the travel agent for our trip.
The other sheets I do are just basic lists of each item (like dinner, tours, shows, costs, other), with the day, time, conf#, special intructions, etc. I just list this stuff out to keep track of all the information, but the calandar sheet is the one I use the most.
You could also do a seperate sheet for each smaller group of people of the 13, and then a "master" one for things everyone is doing. Maybe even break it up for one day per sheet and that way everyone get a copy and knows where everyone else is at any given time.
Good luck!
who knows what'll happen.
)
