Write the day down once,
then hand it to someone else.

An order of the day is one page with a time against every line, from the first supplier who arrives in the morning to the last song at night. It is not a mood board and not a to-do list. Its job is to let six or seven people who have never met run the same day without stopping to ask you a question.

The venue reads it to know when the room must be cleared and when the kitchen fires the first course. The photographer reads it for when the light goes and when the cake is cut. The band read it for one thing above all: when they can get into the room, because a sound check cannot happen with guests in it. The florist reads it for the delivery window, the officiant for the ceremony start.

Your guests read a much shorter version — four or five lines, no load-in times, no supplier numbers. That is the whole trick: one plan, two versions of it. The long one is for people being paid to be there; the short one is for people who need to know when to arrive and roughly when they will eat. When to write it, rather than what goes in it, is a checklist question, and the wedding checklist page has the month-by-month version.

What follows is one hypothetical day rather than a standard. Say ninety people are invited to the whole day and another forty join in the evening, the ceremony and the dinner share a building, and the ceremony is at two. Your officiant, your kitchen and your curfew will move most of these numbers; the shape is the part worth copying.

Hair and make-up start at half past seven, at the house rather than the venue, because they always run long and nobody watches a clock at that hour. The florist reaches the venue at nine and does the ceremony room first, the tables second. The cake arrives at eleven with the caterer's van behind it. The band load in at half past eleven and finish their sound check by one — the real deadline of the morning, because the doors open at quarter past and after that nobody is testing a bass drum.

The photographer arrives at midday, at the house. In some places the officiant wants a short private word with each of you beforehand, so keep ten minutes clear around one o'clock. The doors open at quarter past and the ushers hand out the order of service. You arrive at ten to two. The ceremony starts at two and runs half an hour.

At half past two the ceremony ends and the day's first bottleneck begins. Confetti at twenty-five to three, drinks and canapés from quarter to. The photograph of everybody together is taken at ten to three, while the crowd is still in one place, because that is the group nobody can reassemble once it has found the bar. The rest of the group shots run until half past three — eight of them, no more. Portraits of the two of you at quarter to four, twenty minutes.

The first call to the table goes out at quarter past four, the second at half past. Ninety people take a good fifteen minutes to get from a lawn to a chair however clearly the seating plan is displayed, so everyone is down by twenty to five and the first course lands at quarter to. Main at quarter to six, speeches at quarter to seven, dessert and coffee at twenty past.

Evening guests arrive at quarter to eight, the cake is cut at eight, and the first dance goes at quarter past — late enough that the room has filled, early enough that the band's first set has an audience. Evening food at half past ten. The last song at twenty to midnight and the cars at midnight, because the venue's licence ends there and that is not a number anyone negotiates on the night.

Most of the plan is inert: a florist arriving at nine instead of half past changes nothing. Three moments are different, because everything after them moves when they move.

The first is the end of the ceremony. You will not walk straight out into a drink — there is a receiving line whether you planned one or not, and ninety people who each want thirty seconds with you. Give the twenty minutes after the last note to nothing at all: no photograph inside it, no announcement, nobody looking for you.

The second is the move to the meal, which almost everyone underestimates and every venue has watched fail. A crowd holding drinks does not respond to a single announcement. It needs a call fifteen minutes out, a second at the door, and one person walking the garden. The kitchen has already started plating on the strength of your seating time, so every minute the room takes to fill is a minute the first course spends under a lamp.

The third is the first speech, and it is the hinge of the evening. The kitchen times dessert around it, the band time their first set around it, and the evening guests were given an arrival time based on it. Fix the start, tell the kitchen and the band that number, and tell your speakers how long they have; who speaks and in what order is a separate decision, and our guide to the order of speeches covers it. Twenty minutes late here and the cake, the first dance and the band's last set all shift, because the curfew does not.

Slack works in pools, not in dribbles. Five minutes added to every line is invisible and gets eaten by the first thing that overruns; twenty-five minutes in one place is something you can spend. The drinks reception is the natural pool — the only stretch of the day that can last an hour or an hour and a half without a guest noticing which it turned out to be. Put your buffer there, and a smaller one in front of the speeches.

There are places it does not belong. Not between courses, where a gap means a cold plate and staff standing still; the kitchen runs to its own clock and would rather have the truth than a cushion. Not before the ceremony, where a buffer only means guests watching a door, and where in some places the start time is fixed by whoever conducts it. And not at the end of the night, because the curfew is somebody else's number, not yours.

One habit is worth more than any of this: write the plan in real times, not durations. A line reading 'speeches, 30 minutes' is a hope. '18:45 speeches begin, 19:20 dessert' is a commitment your caterer can hold you to, and it makes an overrun visible the moment it happens rather than at the end of the evening, when the only thing left to cut is the dancing.

Group photographs are the most common overrun, and the reason is arithmetic rather than photography. A group takes about a minute to shoot and three or four to assemble, because somebody is always on the phone or off finding a jacket. Ten groups is closer to forty minutes than to the fifteen you imagined, and it comes straight out of the drinks reception.

So cut the list until it hurts. Write out every combination you think you want, then ask one question of each: is this photograph going to hang somewhere or go in an album? Anything that is the same people in a different order gets merged — one picture of both families replaces four permutations of it. Eight groups is a comfortable list, and the whole-crowd shot is worth taking first, straight after the ceremony, because it is the only one that cannot be recreated later.

Then decide who calls the names, and make sure it is neither you nor the photographer. You cannot be in a photograph and fetching the next group at the same time, and the photographer has no idea which of these people is your mother's brother. Pick one person from each side who knows the faces and does not mind raising their voice. Give them the printed list, the start time, and the job: while one group is being photographed, gather the next.

The supplier version is the long one. Load-in and access times, where the van parks and which door it uses, where the power is, when the room must be clear for the turnaround, when the band can sound-check, the kitchen's fixed points, the curfew, and a number for the one person who can answer a question. Send the same document to everybody with their own lines marked, a fortnight ahead, and send it again if anything moves.

The guest version is four or five lines. Arrive at 13:15. Ceremony at 14:00. Drinks after. Dinner at 16:30. Dancing from 20:00, cars at midnight. That is all most people want, and the more you add the less of it they read. If the evening guests are a different list from the day guests, they can be asked to reply only for the part they are invited to, and the parts they are not invited to need not appear on their page. Parking, taxis and what the dress code means belong on the guest page rather than in the running order, and our guide to the wedding guest information page covers what earns a place there.

A printed order of service does something no screen does: it is in every hand during the ceremony, it carries the readings and the names in the right order, and it survives as a keepsake. But it goes to the printer two or three weeks out, and it is frozen the moment it does.

A page on the phone is the opposite — dull to hold, impossible to lose, and correctable in the last week, which is exactly when the ceremony shifts by fifteen minutes because the officiant has two bookings, or the drinks move indoors because of the forecast. With Vowly the schedule sits on the same guest page people opened to reply to the invitation, so a change made on Thursday is what everyone sees on Friday, each reading it in their own language. Do both: print the ceremony, and let the phone carry the times that can still move.

One rule matters more than any timing on the page: the person holding the plan is not the person getting married. You will be in the photographs, in the receiving line, in the speeches, and dressed in something with nowhere to put a phone. If you are the fallback for every question, you will spend your own wedding being asked things.

If the venue has a coordinator, that is who holds it, and it is worth asking early how far their remit runs — most cover the room, the meal and their own staff, and stop at the edge of your suppliers. If there is no coordinator, name one friend or relative who is not in the wedding party, not making a speech and not in most of the photographs. Give them the printed long version and every supplier number a week ahead.

Then tell every supplier who that person is, in writing, on the document itself. This is the part people skip, and it is why the photographer ends up ringing the bride. Add one line to the foot of the supplier version: if something changes today, ask this person, and this person decides. Rain, a late florist, a speech that runs long — one person decides and one person tells everyone.