Keeping note of what is happening in your life is an excellent way to record life events. I am so thankful to have had this experience of keeping a blog. I can look back and see what was going on in my life over the last two years. This short essay is an excerpt from the online Church News. I thought it was a good reminder of how important it is to keep a journal anyway you can. Our family knows brother Roger Flick from our Cascade Ward days. I just saw one of his daughters last week in the temple. I was pleasantly thrilled to see Wendy, who was a great friend to Tara in high school.
Tips and tricks of the trade
Roger C. Flick has some suggestions for Church members wanting to commence keeping their own journals during 2010.
Brother Flick is somewhat of an expert in the field of LDS personal histories and journal keeping. He teaches classes every year at BYU Education Week about how to maintain a spiritual book of remembrance. He formerly taught students at BYU how to write a comprehensive personal history before he retired from teaching at the university level; he still works at BYU's Harold B. Lee Library in computer-assisted genealogy research and is president of the National Society of the Sons of Utah Pioneers.
Drawing on his experience, he offers the following practical tips for those with their sights set on becoming better journal keepers in 2010:
Try loose-leaf binders: "It was hard for me to keep bound journals because I kept leaving spaces to go back and fill in certain dates, but I never did. So I went to a type of journal that can keep loose pages, [like] a three-ring binder. As things came along I'd keep them in the form that I took the notes and record the date at the top. I don't need to really keep them organized, because organization comes at the end when I have the time to transcribe them onto the computer, print them out and then put them in a three-ring binder."
Use folders and index cards: "When I'm really pressed for time and can't sit down at the computer to put things in their final form, I like to take manila folders or envelopes, label them by subject, and put them in my filing cabinet. If I go to a program or listen to somebody give a presentation, I'll write the essence of it on a 3-by-5 index card and date it and just drop it into a folder by subject or by date. I can write very small and keep a lot of notes on a little card. If I don't get to them right away, it doesn't bother me. When the time is appropriate I will sit down at my computer and type from those little cards, just type up what I want to preserve and throw the little notecards away."
Stay flexible: "What you ought to do is do what works for you. I've done a variety of things, and I think I've finally discovered what works for me.">
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