How to Keep Track of an LDS Missionary's Mission

The first few weeks of a mission are busy enough that record-keeping feels like the least urgent thing on the list. Then six months pass, someone asks when your daughter gets home, and three people in the same family give three different answers. Most of what follows is about avoiding that — deciding once what you are going to keep track of, and picking somewhere to keep it that the rest of the family can reach.

Start with the dates

Two dates do most of the work: the day they entered the field, and their expected release date. Nearly every question a family asks over the next eighteen to twenty-four months is derived from those two numbers — how long they have been out, how long is left, whether they are past halfway.

Write both down somewhere permanent on day one, and note which start date you are using. Some families count from the day the missionary entered the MTC, others from the day they arrived in their assigned area. Either is fine; mixing them is what causes the disagreements.

Worth remembering: an expected release date is a plan. Assignments, visas, health and decisions made by the mission office can all move it. Record it, use it, and be ready to change it rather than treating it as fixed.

The derived numbers

From those two dates you get days served, days remaining and percentage complete. You can work them out by hand — or with the missionary countdown calculator on this site — but the practical problem is that they change every day. Anything you calculate once is stale by next week, which is the main argument for letting an app do it.

Keep track of areas and transfers

A mission is not one place. Missionaries typically move between areas several times, and each move brings a new companion, a new ward or branch, and often a noticeably different setting. Families who write down each area as it happens end up with something genuinely valuable by the end: a route through the mission rather than a vague sense that they were “somewhere in Peru”.

It also helps to record where each area actually is. Mission names rarely tell you much on their own, and putting the area on a map is what turns an abstraction into a place — this is the reasoning behind the missionary map view in Missionary Tracker. A note of the time zone alongside it saves a lot of mental arithmetic when you are trying to work out whether it is a reasonable hour to write — and the sample missionary daily schedule tells you what they are likely to be doing at that hour.

Have one place for updates and photos

Weekly letters, photos from preparation day, and the occasional call are the substance of a mission for the people at home. They are also, typically, scattered across an email account, two group chats and one parent’s camera roll.

Pick a single home for them early. It does not much matter what it is — a shared album, an email folder, a printed binder, a shared profile in an app — as long as it is one thing and everyone knows where it is. The test is whether someone could scroll the whole mission in order afterwards. Most families realise they want that only once it is too late to reconstruct.

If you are weighing the options, we compared them in how to share missionary updates with family and friends.

Decide who is in the loop, deliberately

There is usually a wider circle than the immediate family: grandparents, siblings away at school, cousins, friends from home, ward members. Left to itself, information reaches them unevenly, and one parent quietly becomes the family switchboard — forwarding the same photo to nine people every Monday.

The fix is to decide up front who should hear things and give them a direct way to hear it, rather than routing everything through one person. That might be an email list, a group thread, or a shared profile that people can follow. Missionary Tracker uses a join code for this: the profile is created once and the code is shared with whoever the family chooses, so parents, grandparents, siblings and friends all see the same countdown, area and updates without anyone forwarding anything.

Keep a light touch on privacy

Missionaries are young people living in ordinary neighbourhoods, and their families are usually more comfortable when details stay within a known circle. Two habits go a long way: be specific about who you are sharing with rather than posting publicly by default, and share less detail about exact locations than you might for a holiday.

Whatever tool you use, check what it makes public. Missionary Tracker profiles are not searchable or browsable — following one requires being given its join code — which is the model worth looking for.

What this looks like in practice

A workable setup, in roughly the order you would build it:

1. Record the entry date and expected release date, and note which start date you are counting from.
2. Note the mission, and add each new area as transfers happen — with a rough sense of where it is and what time zone it is in.
3. Choose one home for letters and photos, and put everything there from the beginning.
4. Decide who is in the circle, and give them direct access rather than forwarding.
5. Revisit the release date if it changes, and tell everyone once rather than letting two versions circulate.

Where Missionary Tracker fits

Missionary Tracker is one way to do all of this in a single place. Each missionary gets a profile holding the two dates and the countdown they produce, the area they are serving in on a map, the local time and weather there, and an Updates tab for news. The profile is shared with a join code, so the wider circle follows along directly instead of waiting to be told.

It is not the only approach, and a family with a good spreadsheet and a disciplined group chat can manage perfectly well. The reason an app tends to win over two years is maintenance: nobody has to keep it current, and there is only ever one version of the numbers. For a comparison of the tools families use for each part of this, see best apps for LDS missionary families.

If you want to see what the countdown looks like for your own missionary, the countdown calculator needs nothing more than the two dates.