Keeping a Practice Journal

What was going wrong with your game six months ago? What was going right? How about three months ago? How have you spent most of your practice time over the last 12 months? How many lessons have you taken? What did you learn at each one? How did your play and practice following each lesson improve? Or did it degrade first?

Hopefully you see where I’m going with this.

Looking at the poll currently in my sidebar, a vast majority of respondents want to make significant improvement in their golf games this season. That’s a pretty lofty goal, but it’s certainly achievable for just about everyone. What each of us considers to be significant improvement is certainly a subjective measure, but how do we know when we’ve been meeting our goals?

What if the goal was weight loss? Or, what if it is to learn oil painting? Or, what if the goal is to visit all 50 states in the U.S.?

Fortunately, it’s usually fairly easy to recognize when a goal has been met. If the goal is to lose 50 pounds, when the scale says that 50 pounds are gone, the goal has obviously been met. On the flip side, it’s sometimes difficult to figure out why goals haven’t been met or if we’re even on track to meet them anymore.

That’s where keeping a journal comes in. It can help us look back over time and figure out why the scale isn’t changing or why our golf handicaps are stagnant or why our painting looks like someone just spilled paint on the floor.

One of the things humans do well is, we delude ourselves into thinking that the status quo is fine or that we are making progress when we’re really not. We also tend to have selective memory and to take the path of least resistance.

This is something that I’ve discussed extensively over the years, but why do people tend to spend most of their time at the driving range instead of around the practice green when we all know that the practice green is where we’re going to have the biggest effect on score? Why do people stand at the driving range hitting driver after driver after driver, when they know they’re not hitting any greens in regulation and they’re three-putting most greens?

Keeping a journal isn’t going to fix that, but having a plan will. And keeping a journal will help you stay on plan and help you evaluate your progress as time goes on.

In a lot of ways, Life in the Rough is a journal for me. I try to do semi-regular progress updates to keep track of where my game is going. I also keep track of statistics, which is another form of journal.

A while back, I felt the need to keep track of my practice and play in a more immediate, personal way. I don’t write progress update posts for every event that happens in my golfing life so details are forgotten and lost over time. I keep statistics for many of the rounds that I play, but the numbers don’t really reflect what was going on that day. Things like amount of confidence or swing tendencies can be lost in the numbers.

Believe it or not, I’ve found that despite the fact that we live in the age of computers, that keeping a journal with old fashioned pen and paper works best for me.

Logically, it wouldn’t seem like that should be the case. After all, with a computer journal, if you can type reasonably well, you can put down a lot of information in a shorter amount of time. It can be organized in a myriad of ways. It’s easy to be able to search through the data. You can e-mail it, edit it from many locations, or share it on a website.

However, I’ve found that these modern conveniences don’t really affect or enhance the biggest benefits of keeping a paper journal. Based on my experience for the last 7 1/2 months, here are the benefits I see with keeping a paper journal as well as reasons why doing it electronically doesn’t really add anything compelling enough to make me want to computerize it.

It’s available anywhere. I can pick it up and take it with me to the driving range or read/write in bed right before going to sleep. I could achieve the same thing with my iPhone, but typing out a bunch is kind of time consuming and cumbersome. I don’t need to boot up my PC or laptop, I can just immediately chronicle my practice and play whenever I’m inspired to do so.
It’s personal. The journal is for me, not for sharing online with all of you. It’s not that I mind telling you what’s in there, but I can feel free to whine and complain or brag or express other emotions that I might not want to share with the world.
Writing by hand tends to lend itself to more careful thought and consideration. I can certainly sit down with my laptop and perform a brain dump relatively quickly. I can type out every little detail that comes to mind however unimportant it might be. Writing my journal by hand, however, is a slower process. It forces me to sit there and reflect on what I’m trying to capture. Not only does it force me to limit it to what’s important, but the deliberate reflection helps me learn from what happened at the range or practice green, so that I can adapt my plans for the future. It helps me think about what’s going wrong right then and there instead of having to worry about it down the road when I’ve gotten frustrated enough.
I like leafing through and scanning old entries. Every so often, I pick up the journal and flip through it, trying to see how my swing has progressed. It’s much more pleasurable to do that than to sit at my computer and try and read back through a file of huge brain dumps.
Searching is overrated. We all know that Google has made information more readily available to the world. It’s natural to expect that having a journal that is searchable would be a big benefit, too. However, I’ve found that I just don’t want to use it that way. I don’t have trouble with my driver and then wish I could type “driver problem” into my journal and get a list of every time I had driver trouble so that I can see the trends and how I fixed it. Even as I’m re-reading this paragraph, I can’t help thinking that would be useful. Believe me when I tell you, I can’t explain why, but it’s just not. In general, it seems like searching is beneficial when I want to boil down another person’s information. With my own information, the personal connection is enough. Maybe it’s because my journal is relatively small, so it’s easy to find things. Even I use the search box on Life in the Rough because there’s too much information to sift through to find something. With my journal, though, I don’t miss it one bit.
Don’t get me wrong. Having an electronic journal is better than having none. If you can’t bring yourself to put pen to paper, I understand. The most important thing is to have some kind of plan and to use a journal of some kind to make sure you’re sticking to it and to help you understand what’s going wrong so that you can refine your plan.

I recommend trying a paper journal. I think you’ll find it has the same strengths that I outlined above and that the weaknesses are no big deal. If you don’t like it, you can always go electronic without much hassle. Whichever way you go, give it a try. It will help you keep your golf improvement plan on track.