Your Family Will Spend a Week Guessing. You Could Spend an Hour Instead.
The reason this task never gets done is not that it is hard. It is that it has no deadline, it sounds enormous, and there is never an obvious evening for it. So it stays on the list for years, which is a shame, because the actual job is about an hour and most of that hour is spent deciding you are allowed to have simple opinions.
Here is the trade. One hour now, or roughly a week of guesswork for your family later, compressed into the few days when they are least able to do it well.
What the week looks like
In Australia the first meeting with a funeral director typically happens the day after a death, and the funeral itself within three to seven days. Almost every decision about the service gets settled at that first meeting: burial or cremation, the date, the venue, the celebrant, the music, the notices.
Your family walks into that meeting with whatever they happen to know. If you have written nothing down, what they know is a collection of half-remembered comments, and they have to turn it into specific answers in an hour or two.
Australian Seniors' Cost of Death 2.0 report, researched by CoreData, found the most common disagreements families have when planning a funeral are about the location or the time and date (38%), who finances it and how (36%), and the details of the ceremony (35%). Those arguments are the sound of people guessing in public, in front of each other, while grieving.
The hour, specifically
You do not need a document. You need answers to the questions somebody will be asked. There are fewer than you think.
Burial or cremation. This is the first question and the one with the fewest right answers available to a guesser. Two minutes.
A service, or not, and roughly what sort. Big or small. Religious or not. Something at a venue, or something at a pub, or nothing at all. You are not writing a programme, you are setting a direction. Five minutes.
Where. A suburb, a town, a particular place if you have one. Mostly this matters because people travel. Two minutes.
Anything you actually care about. One or two songs if you have them. A reading. A person you want to speak, or a person you would rather did not. For most people this is a short list and the honest answer to the rest is "I don't mind," which is genuinely useful to write down. Fifteen minutes, including the staring out the window.
Who should be told. This is the one people forget and the one families find hardest. Old friends, former colleagues, the person you had lunch with every month for a decade whose surname nobody else knows. Your family cannot invite people they have never heard of. Twenty minutes, and it is the highest-value twenty minutes of the lot.
Where the practical things are. Not the contents, just the locations. Where the will is, whether there is a prepaid funeral or a policy, which bank. Ten minutes.
Then do the part that makes it work
Tell someone it exists and where to find it. A perfect document nobody can locate on a Saturday morning has done nothing. This step takes one message and it is the difference between the hour counting and the hour being a private exercise.
The same research found 53% of over 50s believe their family is aware of their funeral wishes, which is a much higher number than the proportion who have actually written anything down and told anyone where it is. Believing the message has landed is not the same as the message having landed.
The unglamorous truth about it
Nothing about this is profound. You are not confronting mortality or making peace with anything. You are filling in the answers to six questions, most of which you already know, so that nobody has to invent them later.
People expect it to feel significant and are often slightly disappointed that it feels like admin. That is the point. It is admin. Admin is exactly the thing that is unbearable to do in a week of grief and perfectly easy to do on a Tuesday night while you are only half watching something.