---
title: 'Writing an order of the day your guests will actually read'
description: 'Six lines, real times, and the two moments people most need. Plus the difference between the running order you need and the one they need.'
source: 'https://envelope.love/blog/order-of-the-day'
category: 'Planning'
published: '2026-07-18'
updated: '2026-07-18'
---

# Writing an order of the day your guests will actually read

Six lines, real times, and the two moments people most need. Plus the difference between the running order you need and the one they need.

This is the plain markdown copy of https://envelope.love/blog/order-of-the-day, published by Love Envelope for machine readers. The page itself carries the same words.

There are two orders of the day and they are not the same document. Yours has the florist, the second photographer and the moment the cake is moved. Your guests need six lines.

Publishing yours to a hundred people does not make them better informed. It makes them stop reading at line four, which is usually the one about parking.

## The six lines

1. **Arrival.** Give a window, not a time. From 1.30.
2. **Ceremony.** The exact minute it starts. This is the only hard time on the list and it should look like it.
3. **Drinks and photographs.** The long unstructured stretch. Say roughly how long, or people worry.
4. **Sitting down to eat.** Guests want this one badly and it is often left off.
5. **Speeches and dancing.** One line covers both.
6. **Carriages.** When it ends, and what transport exists at that hour.

## Times, honestly

Two rules and the whole thing works.

**Round everything except the ceremony.** A schedule reading 2.00, 2.45, 3.20, 4.15 will be wrong by four o’clock and your guests will be watching it slip. Round to the half hour and nobody notices a fifteen minute drift.

**Build in the gap you are pretending will not happen.** Photographs always overrun. If you tell guests they are eating at five and they eat at six, that hour is the thing they remember. Say six.

## Where an order of the day changes the day

The stretch between the ceremony and the food is where weddings go quiet. Guests who know it is ninety minutes will get a drink and settle. Guests who think it is twenty minutes will stand near the door, hungry, checking the time.

One extra clause solves it: *Drinks and photographs on the lawn, about an hour and a half. There is food going round and the bar is open.*

## The two moments people actually need

**The ceremony start.** Give an arrival time thirty minutes earlier and say why. *Please be seated by 1.50.*

**The end.** Not just the hour, but the transport. *Carriages at midnight. The last train is 11.20 and there is a taxi number on the bar.* A guest who knows how they are getting home stays later.

## Where it goes

Not on the invitation itself. The card is who, when, where and reply. The order of the day is detail a guest reads later, and later usually means on a phone, standing in a car park.

Printed suites solve this with an extra card that gets lost. A digital invitation keeps it on the same page as the map and the parking note, at the same address you sent in the first place, which is why the running order can be updated in the fortnight before without reprinting anything. The rest of the optional detail is listed in [the invitation checklist](https://envelope.love/blog/invitation-checklist).

## A worked example

> 1.30, Arrive at the barn 2.00, Ceremony, please be seated by ten to 2.45, Drinks on the lawn, about ninety minutes 4.30, Sitting down to eat 7.00, Speeches, then dancing 12.00, Carriages

Six lines. Every one of them a thing a guest has to do or decide.

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Make yours. Six designs, your own words, and one link to send. Free to build, free for a day once it is live. Start an invitation: https://envelope.love/create