How to Keep a Golf Journal You'll Still Be Using in Three Months

Most golfers already keep a golf journal. It is the scorecard folded into the glovebox, sitting under the sunnies and the spare tees. The problem is that it is a scorecard three months old, and it gives you a number but not much else. By the time you find it again you have forgotten at least 18 reasons behind the score.

A golf journal is that same scorecard, kept in a way your future self will thank you for: not just what you shot, but where the ball went and what actually cost you out there across the fairways, greens and avoidable hazards.

What follows is how to keep one — what belongs on the sheet, what to leave off, and how to fill it in fast enough that you will still be doing it in three months.

Analysis paralysis

Too much information is analysis paralysis. Leave off anything you would have to measure with a GPS or a range finder, or anything that demands too much of you while you are still playing. You don't need to record the ball's exact landing spot, or where it crossed the water hazard. That you missed the fairway right and took a penalty is worth capturing. Where precisely the ball crossed from rough into water is of no real value to you, and none at all to the group waiting behind you.

Journals die early from too much information, too much maintenance, and holding up other players while you work out quite how wayward that 3H was. A record you resent is a record you stop keeping.

Why the direction of a miss beats the total

Direction is the most useful thing you will ever collect as a golfer. That matters most if you are only getting out once a fortnight. Here is what that looks like once you actually have enough rounds logged to see it.

Say you hit 48 per cent of your fairways. It is a real number, honestly counted. Now do the same thing at the range mid-week: a tick every time you land in your imaginary fairway. At the end of the session, count them up. Those ticks still have not told you where a single one of the misses went.

So do not just record a tick. Record a direction. Hit, missed left, missed right, fairway bunker. Four outcomes, one per hole. A dozen rounds of that and something appears which a fairways-hit percentage can never show you: your miss is far more consistent than you think, both across a large number of rounds and on specific holes at your local. And a miss you can name is a miss you can plan around.

With direction in mind, you have a plan. You aim down the left edge, because the ball goes right. You take the 3H on the hole where the trouble sits on the right, so the big miss the driver keeps producing is taken out of play — which also cuts the risk of a penalty and improves your chance of hitting the fairway. See where the plan takes you? You stop treating every wayward tee shot as a fresh mystery to be solved on the tee, or with a swing coach, because you know your direction. From direction you get a trend, and from a trend you get a plan.

Do the same for the greens. Short, long, left, right. Being consistently short is a club selection and ego problem rather than a ball striking one, and you will never work that out from a GIR percentage alone. Believe me. I have tried.

Go digital with Diary of a Golfer

With paper journals, about ten rounds in is where most people stop, and it is worth knowing in advance so that you do not.

Somewhere around then, the paper starts working against you. That is what I found, and it is why I built the digital version. Sooner or later you have to start adding it up, and adding it up across rounds is harder than working out your Stableford after an eventful day.

That is why Diary of a Golfer exists. It is typed into a database secured just for you, kept for you to revisit later, with the arithmetic and the analysis across multiple rounds done for you and kept up to date on your own dashboard. What you are reading is the golfer you are today, benchmarked against your historic self.

It shows you the direction your tee shots go. Which hole on your home course quietly takes the most off you, and how often it costs you a penalty. It gives you somewhere to record the trip to Scotland that made you want to keep playing, and a page for the techniques you picked up off Golf Sidekick's YouTube channel, so you still have them when you are standing over the ball.

And because you wrote something down about your rounds, your directions, your sentiments and your tendencies, the AI reads those notes back and tells you what it noticed across many rounds, not just one. From there you can ask it all sorts of questions about your game. The more rounds you log, the better it reads you. An interpretation of your own words and deeds — the good, the bad and the ugly — not a measurement of your swing on a cold frosty morning.

— Marty