You Play Once a Fortnight. Here is the Only Practice that Fits

Say you play a fortnight apart. That is about twenty-six rounds a year, and they are the whole of your golf. A range session costs you an hour on the mat plus the drive each way. Call it two hours. Do that monthly and it is twenty-four hours a year — and it is the first thing to disappear the moment the kids demand a trip to the beach or the mall instead.

Now price the alternative. Thirty seconds of journaling after each hole, plus a minute at the end on how the round actually went, is ten minutes a round. Across twenty-six rounds that is four hours and twenty minutes for the year, about the time it takes to play a single eighteen. And you finish the year with twenty-six rounds of data.

So the choice is twenty-four hours a year of range work, or four hours and twenty minutes of journaling. The question is not which is better in principle. It is which one you will still be doing when life's inevitable pressures find their way into your golf time — work, kids, partners, house chores, injuries and bad weather.

Awareness changes your next round. Practice changes it eventually

A range session works on your swing, and a swing takes months to move. That is not a criticism, it is how motor learning works. If you have the hours, spend them.

Knowing your own tendencies works on your decisions, and a decision changes the very next time you stand on that tee. You know the miss is right — because you have been recording the direction, not just the count — so you aim at the left edge and let it work back. You know the seventh has taken more penalties off you than any other hole, so you hit the club that leaves you a hundred metres out instead of the one that flirts with the trouble. Neither of those needs a swing change. Neither of those needs an hour you do not have.

A lot of amateur scoring is not a swing problem at all. It is the same handful of high-risk but avoidable decisions, made again and again, by someone who has never seen them written down next to each other.

Why infrequent golf makes this more important, not less

The instinct is that if you only play occasionally, recording it hardly matters. The opposite is true.

When you play three times a week the evidence is recent, so you have a rough feel for your game. When you play once a fortnight, what you know is a month old and heavily edited by memory. You remember the good drive on the sixteenth. You do not remember the three tee shots that leaked right before it.

The less often you play, the less you can trust your recollection, and the more a written record is worth.

The most valuable thirty seconds in your round

The routine is deliberately small. After each hole, spend thirty seconds putting into Diary of a Golfer what actually happened: where the tee shot finished, whether you hit the green — or on a par 3, hit or missed — any penalties, how many putts, and confirm the score. That is it. It is all push-button, and it takes thirty seconds. Over five rounds, or fifteen, or fifty, it becomes something you can genuinely analyse.

For the golfer with no time, that is the highest return per minute available. Not because it is better than practice, but because it is the only thing that fits.

— Marty