Why and How to Keep a Personal Journal

I started and abandoned journals for twenty years before one finally stuck — and the difference had nothing to do with writing talent. Here’s why a plain record of an ordinary life turns out to matter so much, and the simple system that kept mine alive.

Updated August 2026 · 12 min read

On the top shelf of my closet there’s a cardboard box with six half-empty journals in it. The first is a blue hardback I got at baptism age, with three earnest entries in a child’s handwriting and then nothing. The next two belong to my teenage years — a dramatic January, silence by March. There’s the one I bought before my mission, the one I bought on my mission (better, but patchy), and the handsome leather one I received as a wedding gift, with exactly eleven entries, the last dated about fourteen years ago. For a long time I thought that box was evidence that I’m just “not a journal person.”

Then two things happened that changed my mind. The first was helping clean out my grandmother’s house after she passed away, and finding her journals — not eloquent volumes, but dozens of cheap steno notebooks full of the most ordinary sentences imaginable. “I canned fourteen quarts of peaches today and my back is complaining.” “Bobby got the part in the school play and tried to act like he didn’t care, but he does.” I sat on her kitchen floor and read for two hours. Nothing in them was profound. All of it was precious. The second was realizing that my own kids were growing up in a house with no record of what any of it felt like — the funny prayers, the hard moves, the small answered ones — except my memory, which is already starting to blur the edges.

So I started again, a few years back, with a different approach. No leather binding, no vows, no pressure. And this time it stuck. What follows is everything I wish someone had told me during the blue-hardback years: why a personal journal is worth the trouble, how to pick a format you’ll actually use, what to write when nothing happened, and the habits that keep a journal alive past February. I’ll also tell you the mistakes to skip, because I’ve made all of them and I have the half-empty notebooks to prove it.

First, What This Article Is Not About

A quick clarification, because these two get confused constantly: a personal journal is not the same thing as a scripture journal. Scripture journaling is a study practice — notes, cross-references, and impressions about the verses you’re reading. It’s a wonderful habit, and if that’s what you’re looking for, I wrote a whole separate piece on scripture journaling methods that actually work, with several approaches you can start tonight.

A personal journal is something different: it’s the record of your life. What happened today, what you thought about it, what your family did, what you learned the hard way, what you’re hoping for, what you’re grateful for, what made you laugh. Your scripture study notes might occasionally cross into it — mine do — but the personal journal’s job is to capture a life, not a lesson manual. Nephi kept two records for a reason, and one of them was the history of his people. Think of this as your small version of that second record.

Why Bother? What a Journal Actually Does

It’s fair to ask why anyone should add one more item to an already overloaded day. I can only tell you what mine has done for me, in three layers.

It catches things your memory will not

This sounds dramatic, but it’s just arithmetic: you will forget most of your life. Not the highlights — the texture. What your four-year-old prayed about on the Tuesday her fish died. What the house smelled like the week you brought the baby home. How it actually felt, in your chest, the morning of your daughter’s baptism, as opposed to how the photos look. I have reread my own entries from six years ago and discovered entire events — good ones! — that I have zero conscious memory of. The journal remembered them for me. A life unwritten is a life that quietly evaporates, one detail at a time.

It turns you into a witness of your own spiritual life

In the October 2007 general conference, President Henry B. Eyring described a habit that changed his life: each evening, he would ask himself one question — “Have I seen the hand of God reaching out to touch us or our children or our family today?” — and then write down the answer. His talk, “O Remember, Remember,” is worth reading in full. I’ve borrowed his question for years now, and here’s what happens when you use it: on the days when you feel like nothing spiritual occurred, the act of looking for God’s hand almost always finds it — a timely phone call, an unexpected patience with a child, a prompting to text someone who needed it. You start keeping a journal to record blessings; you end up with a journal because you’re finally noticing them.

There’s a reason “remember” is one of the most repeated words in all of scripture. Writing is simply remembering with better tools. A journal converts scattered mercies into a record you can reread in a hard season — and believe me, rereading your own account of past deliverance is a different experience than being told, generically, that God loves His children. You have receipts.

It becomes an inheritance

President Spencer W. Kimball urged Church members for decades to keep personal records, and his short classic on the subject — “The Angels May Quote from It” — makes the point with its title alone: write your life well enough that “the angels may quote from it for eternity.” I used to hear that as pressure to be profound. My grandmother’s steno notebooks taught me to hear it differently. The angels don’t need my eloquence. My descendants don’t either. What they need is to know that a real person, related to them, canned peaches with a sore back, worried about a teenager, felt God near on an unremarkable Thursday, and kept going. That’s not literature. That’s a testimony across time.

You will forget most of your life — not the highlights, the texture. A journal is how the ordinary days survive long enough to become precious.

And don’t underestimate the family-history angle. Someday a grandchild or great-grandchild will open FamilySearch, see your name and dates, and wish there was more. A journal is the more. It’s the difference between being a line on a pedigree chart and being a person they can almost hear.

Paper, Digital, or Voice? An Honest Comparison

The format wars are where good intentions go to shop instead of write. I’ve kept all three kinds, and each has a real personality. Here is my honest report, with no loyalty to any of them.

My verdict after all these years: paper for depth, digital for survival. My real journal is a cheap lined notebook — not leather, because leather made me feel like every entry had to deserve it — that lives next to the chair where I sit after the kids go down. But during one brutal stretch with a newborn and a deadline-heavy job, the entire journal was three-line entries in my phone’s notes app typed with one thumb, and I’m grateful for every one of those scrappy lines. The worst format is the beautiful one you never touch. Pick the one that fits your actual days, not the days you wish you had.

One practical warning for the digital route: export and back up. Once a month, I email myself a copy of my phone-journal seasons and my wife does the same with hers. Apps die, phones fall in lakes, and twenty years from now that proprietary format may not open. Paper has a five-hundred-year track record. Your cloud folder does not.

What to Write on a Perfectly Ordinary Day

Here is the single biggest journal killer, and it’s not laziness: the belief that today didn’t count. You sit down, scan the day, find no miracles, no milestones, no plot twists — just work, dishes, a commute, a sibling squabble, bedtime — and you close the book. Do that three times and the journal is dead. So let me say it plainly: the ordinary day is not the obstacle to a journal. The ordinary day is the journal. My grandmother’s peaches. That’s the whole genre.

When the day feels blank, steal one of these prompts. I keep this list taped inside the front cover of my notebook:

• Three facts and a feeling. Write three plain facts about today (“Dentist appointment. Spaghetti for dinner. Rain all afternoon.”) and then one sentence about how any of it felt. Facts are easy; the feeling is where the entry comes alive.
• The Eyring question. “Where did I see the hand of God today?” Small answers are the best answers: a coworker’s kindness, a green light when a child was late to practice, a scripture that surfaced at the right moment.
• Quote of the day. Write down the funniest or most startling thing anyone in your house said. Kids are an endless supply. Future-you will weep laughing at these, guaranteed.
• Right now I’m worried about / hoping for. Two sentences. This one feels pointless in the moment and reads like gold five years later, when you know how the worry turned out.
• What I learned the hard way this week. A recipe ratio, a parenting tactic that backfired, a work lesson. A journal doubles nicely as a manual of your own experience.
• Describe one ordinary thing in detail. The kitchen table on a Tuesday. Your grandfather’s hands. Sunday morning chaos before church. The detail you think is boring today is exactly the detail that won’t exist in twenty years.
• A prayer you can’t say out loud right now. Some of my most honest entries are written prayers — the worry I didn’t want to voice at bedtime, gratitude I’d have felt awkward saying to anyone else.

Notice what none of these require: inspiration. A journal is a net, not a performance. You cast it over whatever the day actually contained.

The milestones take care of themselves

Baptisms, blessings, missionary farewells, temple trips, new callings, the day a child was confirmed — you’ll write about those without prompting, because big days beg to be recorded. A tip for those entries: include the unphotogenic specifics. Not just “Emma was baptized today,” but who spoke, what her grandpa said at the luncheon, that she wore her cousin’s white dress with the hem let out, and that she was so nervous she forgot to plug her nose. Those are the details that make a grown woman tear up reading her own baptism entry at forty. Spiritual milestones deserve more than dates — they deserve atmosphere.

How to Make the Habit Actually Stick

Everything above is worthless if the journal dies in February, so let’s talk about the machinery. If you’ve read my piece on building a scripture study habit that sticks, some of this will sound familiar — the same principles apply, because habits are habits.

Attach it to a routine that already exists

“I’ll write sometime today” is a promise your day will break by 9 a.m. A journal needs an anchor — something you already do every day without fail. Mine is embarrassingly specific: the notebook lives on the end table next to my chair, and I do not get to pick up my phone after the kids are down until I’ve written at least two sentences. Journal before phone. My wife anchors hers to Sunday afternoon — hers is a weekly journal, two pages every Sunday while dinner is in the oven, and she has kept it for eleven years. Other anchors I’ve seen work: with morning scripture study, on the train commute, during a child’s piano lesson, right after the evening prayer. The trigger matters more than the time of day.

Set the minimum at two minutes

My daily minimum is two minutes of writing. Not two pages — two minutes. On paper it sounds trivial, but the minimum isn’t the entry; it’s the door. Most nights, two minutes becomes ten, because starting is the hard part and continuing is easy. On the wrecked days — the flu, the 14-hour shift, the night the water heater dies — two minutes is still possible, and the chain stays unbroken. “Long day. Everyone alive. The van made a weird noise. Emma lost a tooth and the Tooth Fairy almost forgot.” Done. That’s a real entry, and I’d rather read it in thirty years than nothing.

Give yourself a weekly catch-up, guilt-free

Some seasons don’t allow daily writing. Fine. Install a weekly catch-up instead: fifteen minutes on Sunday to rough in the week — Monday was this, Wednesday was that — and expand whatever deserves it. A weekly journal kept faithfully beats a daily journal kept for nine days. President Eyring wrote nightly, and it’s a beautiful practice if you can hold it; but the commandment-sized version of this principle is “remember,” not “remember daily by 9 p.m. or else.”

What Not to Do

Four mistakes, all personally tested across that box of dead journals in my closet.

• Don’t wait for profound days. This is the big one. If your journal only records milestones, it will have twelve entries a decade and you’ll miss the entire middle of your life — which, it turns out, is where your life actually was.
• Don’t backfill out of guilt. Missed three months? Do not try to reconstruct them entry by entry. Write one short summary paragraph — “Summer 2025: we moved, Jake started kindergarten, I was more tired than I admitted at the time” — and then resume from today. Guilt about gaps has ended more journals than silence ever did. The gap is part of the record too.
• Don’t perform for an imaginary audience. The moment you start writing for future readers instead of for truth, the journal goes stiff and generic. Write honestly and edit your legacy later. Descendants can tell the difference between a record and a press release, and they treasure the record.
• Don’t record only the good. Hard seasons belong in there too — handled with charity toward real people, of course, and you can be discreet about names and private matters. But a journal that pretends every year was wonderful teaches your descendants nothing. Mine shows a man who struggled, prayed, got some answers late, and kept going. That might be the most useful thing I ever leave behind.

A Simple Checklist to Start This Week

If you want to begin in the next few days, here’s the whole system, condensed. Nothing here requires talent, money, or a more interesting life.

• Day 1 — Get a cheap notebook (or open a new document, or download a voice-memo habit). Spend less than five dollars or nothing. Fancy comes later if it comes at all.
• Day 1 — Choose your anchor. Write one sentence: “After I ____, I will write for two minutes.” Fill in something you already do daily.
• Day 1 — Write your first entry. Two minutes, three facts and a feeling. Ugly is allowed. Ugly is the tradition.
• Days 2–7 — Just show up. Same anchor, same two-minute floor. Don’t evaluate the quality of anything for at least a month.
• Week 2 — Add one prompt. Pick a favorite from the list above — the Eyring question is my recommendation — and use it on blank days.
• Missed days? Apply the rule. No backfilling, no guilt. One summary sentence if you want, then resume from today. The journal serves you, not the reverse.
• Day 30 — Reread the whole thing. This is the moment the habit becomes self-sustaining, because you’ll find at least three entries you’re genuinely glad exist. That’s the fuel.

The Person Who Will Thank You

I’ll close with the scene that started all this for me. My grandmother never wrote anything profound in those steno notebooks, as far as I found. But in one entry from 1987 she wrote that she’d had a hard week, that she’d prayed about something she didn’t name, and that on her morning walk she’d had “a quiet feeling it would be alright, and it was.” That’s the entire entry. I have no idea what the hard week was. But I know she had one, I know she prayed, and I know the Lord answered her — and reading it in her own handwriting, on her kitchen floor, I felt her faith reach forty years forward and steady mine.

That’s what you’re making, on the boring Tuesdays, in two-minute entries that feel like nothing. You’re not writing a memoir. You’re leaving evidence — of a life lived, of a family loved, of a God who shows up in ordinary days if somebody bothers to write down that He did. Somebody in the future is going to need that evidence. It might be your grandchild. On certain nights, if we’re honest, it’s us.

So get the cheap notebook. Tonight, two minutes, three facts and a feeling. The angels can quote from peaches and rain and lost teeth just fine.

This article reflects personal experience and study, not an official statement of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Talks referenced in the text can be read at ChurchofJesusChrist.org: “O Remember, Remember” by President Henry B. Eyring (October 2007 general conference) and “The Angels May Quote from It” by President Spencer W. Kimball (New Era, October 1975).