How to Study General Conference Talks After Conference

Every conference weekend I come away glowing, and by the following Thursday I can barely remember three talks. It took me years to learn that conference isn’t meant to be a two-day event — it’s a six-month curriculum. Here’s the simple system that finally made the talks stick between April and October.

Updated August 2026 · 13 min read

Sunday night after the last session, I always feel the same thing: full. Ten hours of talks, a notebook with four pages of scribbles, two or three lines that hit me hard enough to write in capital letters, and a quiet resolve that this conference is going to change my life. Then Monday happens. The kids need rides, work piles up, the notebook migrates under a stack of mail, and by the time the next conference rolls around I realize I’ve re-read maybe one talk — the one the bishop quoted in sacrament meeting the week after.

If that’s you, welcome. I’ve run that exact cycle more times than I want to admit. What finally broke it was a small realization: the Brethren don’t design conference to be consumed in a weekend. There are roughly thirty talks in a general conference and roughly twenty-six weeks until the next one. The math practically hands you a study plan — one talk a week, with a few weeks of slack. Conference weekend is the broadcast. The six months after are the course.

This article is the system I’ve settled into over the last few years, written the way I’d describe it to a friend after church. It covers how to choose which talks to revisit first (not in session order), how I mark them up, the weekly rhythm that actually survives real life, and how to work the talks into family discussions, ministering, and any talk or lesson you’re asked to give. Take the pieces that fit. And if you do nothing else, do the last section — one talk, one change. That alone is worth more than re-reading all thirty in a fog.

Why the Glow Fades by Thursday

It’s worth naming why conference inspiration evaporates so fast, because it’s not a character flaw — it’s how memory works. During the sessions we’re in listening mode, not studying mode. We’re catching a phrase here, a story there, half-distracted by a toddler or a casserole. The Spirit absolutely testifies in the moment; that’s real. But hearing something once, even something true, doesn’t lodge it anywhere usable.

The Savior promised that the Holy Ghost would “bring all things to your remembrance” (John 14:26) — and I’ve noticed that remembrance usually needs raw material to work with. When I’ve actually studied a talk, marked it, and written a line about it, the Spirit brings it back at the strangest, most useful moments: mid-conversation with a struggling teen, sitting in a waiting room, deciding whether to say yes to something. When I’ve only heard it once, there’s nothing to bring back. The well is dry.

There’s also a quieter reason the glow fades: we treat the talks as finished. Conference weekend ends, the tab closes, and we move on. But the talks keep sitting there in the Gospel Library, waiting. I’ve come to think of them less like a broadcast I watched and more like a stack of letters from people who love me, still unopened on the counter.

Choosing Which Talks to Revisit First

My old approach was to start at the beginning — Saturday morning session, first talk — and work straight through. It died every time, usually around talk six, because session order isn’t study order. Some talks were prepared for the whole Church; some land specifically on your current season of life; some you simply weren’t awake for. Now I triage the whole conference into four piles during the week after, and study in that order.

Pile one: the talk that stung

There’s almost always one talk where a single sentence went through me like a needle — the one I slightly didn’t enjoy, the one about the habit or the grudge or the thing I’ve been avoiding. That discomfort is a flag, not a nuisance. In my experience it’s the Spirit pointing at the exact place He’s ready to work on. I study that talk first, while the sting is fresh. Not fun. Always worth it.

Pile two: the talk that comforted

The second pile is the talk that felt like it was written for me — the one that answered the prayer I’d been carrying into conference. I re-read it slowly in week two, and this time I mark every phrase that felt personal. This is the talk I’ll return to all six months, and usually the one I end up quoting to other people.

Pile three: the talk I slept through or missed

Be honest: you missed one. Maybe a whole session. During one October conference I was helping my parents move and caught almost nothing live. Those talks go third, because they’re the only ones I truly haven’t heard at all, and they regularly contain the surprise favorite of the whole conference.

Pile four: everything else, prophet first

The remaining talks fill out the six months, but with one rule: whenever the President of the Church speaks, his talk jumps the queue. When President Nelson gave his short, powerful address “Hear Him” in April 2020, I must have studied it five times that year, and it reordered how I think about personal revelation. Prophetic talks have a way of sounding simple on first hearing and enormous on the fourth reading.

Don’t study conference in session order. Study it in Spirit order: the talk that stung, the talk that comforted, the talk you missed, then everything else.

Marking Up a Talk: Gospel Library vs. Paper

Once I’ve picked a talk, I don’t just re-read it — I mark it up, because marking forces a decision about what actually mattered. I’ve done this both digitally and on paper for years, and both work. They’re just different tools.

In the Gospel Library app, my method is: highlight in yellow anything that teaches doctrine, underline in red anything that asks me to do something, and add a note — even three words — wherever a personal application pops into my head. The notes sync across devices, which means the thought I had on a Tuesday is still there when I’m preparing a lesson six months later. The tags feature is underrated, too: I tag talks by topic (“prayer,” “patience,” “revelation”) so I can pull up everything conference has said on a subject in about ten seconds.

On paper, I print the talk double-spaced — you can print from the talk’s page on ChurchofJesusChrist.org — and go at it with a pencil: circles, arrows, margin questions, the occasional “YES” or “ouch.” Paper is slower and messier and, for me, deeper. Something about handwriting an application in the margin commits it to memory in a way tapping a screen doesn’t. I keep the printed pages in a three-ring binder labeled by conference, and flipping through past binders is like reading a journal of what the Lord was teaching me each season.

One tip that changed my marking: I stopped highlighting “nice quotes” and started highlighting verbs. The doctrine phrases make me nod; the verb phrases — “ask,” “forgive,” “begin,” “let go” — are where the talk is aimed at my actual life. If you want a deeper dive into annotation approaches, the same principles in our guide to scripture journaling methods work beautifully on conference talks, since a marked talk and a marked chapter are really the same craft.

A Realistic Six-Month Rhythm Between Conferences

Here’s the rhythm that has survived three years of real life in our house. It’s built on one weekly slot and one monthly slot — not a daily obligation, because daily conference-study resolutions die the same death daily everything resolutions die.

Weekly: one talk, one sitting (15–20 minutes)

Every Sunday after church, before the afternoon dissolves, I take one talk from my triage piles and study it properly — read or re-listen, mark it, and write one sentence at the top of the page or in a note: “This week, this talk is asking me to ___.” That’s the whole weekly practice. Fifteen to twenty minutes. Some Sundays it’s rich; some Sundays I’m tired and it’s mostly a skim with one highlight. Both count. The point is contact, not brilliance.

Monthly: one talk goes deep

Once a month, usually on fast Sunday, I pick the one talk that has mattered most so far and give it the full treatment: printed copy, pencil, cross-references to the scriptures it cites, and a few paragraphs in my journal about what’s changed since I started applying it. This is the session where a talk stops being content and becomes part of me. If you only have bandwidth for one level of this system, make it this one.

If your daily scripture habit is solid, you can also fold talks into it — a paragraph of a conference talk after your chapters — but I’d gently warn against replacing scripture study with talks. The talks themselves keep sending you back to the scriptures; that’s by design. If your daily habit needs shoring up first, start there — our piece on building a daily scripture study habit covers the system I use, and the conference rhythm layers right on top of it.

Talking About the Talks: Family, Ministering, and Hallways

Studying alone is half the design. The other half is talking about the talks, because teaching something is how it moves from my notebook into my bones. Here’s what that looks like in practice, at least in our imperfect house.

Family: one quote at dinner, not a second Sunday School

I tried the formal approach once — gathering everyone on a weeknight to re-read a full talk together. It went about as well as you’d expect with a teenager and a nine-year-old. What works instead is tiny: I pick one sentence from my current talk and read it at dinner, then ask, “What do you think he meant by that?” Ninety seconds, done. Some nights it’s a dud. But my kids now know what conference is for, and every so often the nine-year-old says something that stops the table. I also keep a printed quote from the current talk taped inside a kitchen cabinet. Low-tech, weirdly effective.

Ministering: bring the talk, not a lecture

Conference talks have quietly rescued my ministering visits. Instead of scrambling for a message, I share the one talk I’ve been studying — usually just the paragraph I underlined in red and one honest sentence about why it mattered to me that week. Personal beats polished every time. “This line got me, and I wondered if it would mean anything to you” opens more real conversation than any perfectly organized message I’ve ever prepared. And when a family is going through something specific — a diagnosis, a job loss, a wayward child — there’s almost always a recent conference talk that speaks to it with more wisdom than I have.

Everywhere else: the casual mention

The lowest-pressure sharing of all is just referencing talks naturally — “that reminded me of something from last conference” — in a hallway chat, a comment in elders quorum, a text to a friend. You’re not preaching; you’re just a person whose mind is stocked with recent prophetic counsel. People notice, and they’d rather hear one sentence you actually used than a summary of a talk you skimmed.

Turning One Talk Into One Change

This is the heart of the whole thing, so let me be direct: the goal of studying a conference talk is not to know the talk. It’s to do something different. Nephi said he did “liken all scriptures” to his people, that it might be for their profit and learning (1 Nephi 19:23) — and likening, applied to conference, means translating a talk into one concrete, dated, doable act.

My rule is one application per talk, written in the smallest possible unit. Not “be more patient” — that’s a mood, not a plan. Instead: “When my daughter pushes back about homework this week, I will count to five before I answer.” Not “improve my prayers” — instead: “For seven days, end my morning prayer by asking who I can help today, then write down the first name that comes.” Small, specific, and finished inside a week or two. Then, if it stuck, keep it; if it didn’t, adjust and try the next talk’s invitation.

I’ll give you a real one. After a conference talk on gratitude a couple of years back, my application was embarrassingly small: tell my wife one specific thing I appreciated about her, out loud, every day for two weeks. It took maybe twenty seconds a day. It also quietly changed the temperature of our marriage that month in a way I did not expect and could not have engineered by effort alone. That’s what the Lord does with small obediences — He magnifies them past their size.

And when the six months are up, I don’t have thirty changes to show for it. I usually have three or four that actually became part of me. Three or four real changes per conference, twice a year, compounded over a lifetime — that’s not a study plan anymore. That’s a discipleship plan.

When You’re the One Giving the Talk or Lesson

Sooner or later someone hands you an assignment — a sacrament talk, a quorum lesson, a youth fireside — and conference talks become your best raw material. Here’s my workflow after getting it wrong a few times.

First, resist the quote collage. Early in my teaching years I built a talk that was essentially twelve conference quotes stitched together, and it had all the warmth of a patchwork fence. People don’t need you to re-report conference; they were there. They need your witness. So now I build backwards: I start with the principle I’m assigned, pick the one conference talk that teaches it best, and then spend most of my preparation on my own experience with that principle — where I’ve seen it true, where I’ve failed at it, what it costs.

Second, when I quote, I quote short and cite clean: speaker, conference, and the exact sentence, double-checked against the text on ChurchofJesusChrist.org. I’ve heard too many mangled quotes from the pulpit (and delivered one or two myself) to wing this anymore. The full archive of every conference talk, back for decades, is in the general conference section of ChurchofJesusChrist.org, searchable by speaker and topic. And because my tagged notes from the last several conferences live in Gospel Library, finding “everything Elder So-and-So has said about forgiveness since 2021” takes minutes instead of a Saturday.

Third, end with what you’re doing about it. The most memorable sacrament talks I’ve heard in our ward weren’t the most doctrinally dense — they were the ones where a normal member said, “Here’s what this conference talk asked of me, and here’s the messy, honest story of trying.” That’s a model any of us can follow, and it’s exactly what six months of conference study equips you to do.

Your First Week After Conference: A Checklist

If you want to start this coming week, here’s the whole system condensed. Screenshot it before the glow fades.

• Day 1 — Download or bookmark the talks. Open the Gospel Library app, find the conference, and make sure the talks are saved for offline reading. Ten minutes, done.
• Day 2 — Triage the conference. Scan the list of talks and sort them into your four piles: the talk that stung, the talk that comforted, the ones you missed, everything else (prophet first). Write the order down.
• Day 3 — Claim your weekly slot. Pick the recurring 15–20 minute window where one talk gets studied each week. Sunday afternoon works for me; yours might be Monday lunch. Put it on the calendar as a repeating event.
• Day 4 — Choose your marking method. App highlights and tags, printed talks and a pencil, or the hybrid. Print the first talk now if paper is your path — friction tonight is failure on Sunday.
• Day 5 — Study pile one, talk one. The talk that stung. Mark the verbs. Write the one sentence: “This week, this talk is asking me to ___.”
• Day 6 — Turn it into one small act. Convert that sentence into something specific and doable within seven days. Small enough that it can’t fail dramatically.
• Day 7 — Share one line. At dinner, in a text, in a ministering visit — quote one sentence from the talk and one honest line about why it got you. Notice how much deeper it settles after you’ve said it out loud.

Conference Was Never a Weekend

I used to think of general conference as something I attended. I’ve come to think of it as something I live inside of, for six months at a stretch — a rolling conversation between the prophets, the scriptures, and whatever season of life I’m in, renewed every April and October. The weekend is just the moment the letters arrive. The study is opening them.

The Lord said, “Whether by mine own voice or by the voice of my servants, it is the same” (D&C 1:38). If I really believe that, then the talks sitting in my app aren’t religious content to be caught up on — they’re current counsel meant for me, this year, in this house, with these exact problems. That belief is what finally got me past the notebook-under-the-mail years.

So start small. This week: one talk — the one that stung. Mark it, write the sentence, do the one small thing, say one line out loud to somebody. Then do it again next week. By the time the next conference begins, you won’t just have watched the talks. You’ll have walked with them for half a year — and they’ll have changed the walk.

This article reflects personal experience and study, not an official statement of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Sources cited in the text: “Hear Him,” President Russell M. Nelson, April 2020; John 14 (verse 26); 1 Nephi 19 (verse 23); Doctrine and Covenants 1 (verse 38); and the general conference archive, all at ChurchofJesusChrist.org. Other passages are referenced by name only.