Dates are set, reservations made....

The next step is to plan your high level itenerary. That is, what parks on which day, which coincides with which restaurants (if you are using the Dining Plan and/or making sit-down meal reservations 180 days in advance - as you should!). I know the restaurant reservation thing sounds CA-RAZY... but we'll touch on that later.

I personally use two websites to decide which parks we will go to on which day.

Walt Disney World Made Easy - A free website run by one man who lives near Disney World. He literally hits up "the world" 2-3 times a week to prove his methods. Plus, the author's humor cannot be beat. Josh cracks me up!

Touring Plans - A not free, subscription site that is well worth the money for a one year subscription. It is based on a book series (with a new edition every year) called the Unnoficial Guide to Walt Disney World. They have more of a statistical analysis approach, and have the numbers to back it up. EasyWDW goes by his experience. TouringPlans goes by the numbers.

As with anything involving humans, there are trends and statistics surrounding the crowds. Humans are lemings, they follow eachother and through general instinct follow the same actions and reactions. That, along with historical crowd information, we can easily find out which park will be the least crowded on which day.

That said, I start composing a spreadsheet using Google Docs. This makes it easy to view anywhere, even on my iPhone. An example of my spreadsheet is below. I lay out each day, and list the parks with the respective hours for each day. I also use it to throw random notes into when I read about something I want to do online. I'll just throw it onto a certain day, or by a certain park, so I am reminded to add it to my touring plans when I do those later on.
I also note which park has "Extra Magic Hours" (aka "EMH) by bolding the AM or PM for each park.... EMH is a "perk" offered to guests staying on Walt Disney property. This is important, because as a general rule - planners in the know AVOID that specific park with EMH on that day. It sounds whack, I know... but the thing is that the general public swarms to the EMH park that day, typically making it more crowded. So hence, we avoid.

Once all the days are listed out, park hours filled in, etc. I go back to both EasyWDW and TouringPlans and note which park is recomended by each website and which park is the "park to avoid" that day. You can see this in the fourth and fifth columns from the left (that are red, green and yellow). I color code for ease of viewing and deciding. For the most part, the two websites coincide, but sometimes they don't based on the different methodologies used. Here's where you just get to play with which parks you want to visit and how many days - and fenangle it to what you think will work best. I tend to lean towards what Josh @ EasyWDW.com tells me, because he posts pictures a few times a week proving his predictions were right (or I have yet to see - wrong). To me, the proof is in the pudding.

Let me be clear, that you shouldn't fret too much over getting the "perfect" park on the perfect day. Yes, I spend time on this, but I don't kill myself over it. Because the MOST important and most effective part of planning your disney vacation are your plans once you get in those parks, not necessarily the crowd levels that day. If EasyWDW is telling you it's the park to avoid, and TouringPlans says its the park to go too... don't be up to 2 am fretting over it and ordering an Rx for xanax because you just can't decide. I have been to parks on "red" or "super oh hell to the no do not go there" (otherwise known as "not recomended") park days and we did JUST fine, because we had a flawless Park Touring Plan.

So get your days set, and we're off to Dining Reservations and Meal Planning!!