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This is the time of year when we’re reminded New Year’s Resolutions are unsustainable. What seems like a solid plan on January 1 loses momentum after a few weeks, and by February you’re back keeping all your clothes in a sprawling heap on your bedroom floor (just as, ahem, a hypothetical).

Golf resolutions are the same. I can tell you everything I want to do differently this year. The hard part is doing them faithfully for the next 12 months.

That brings us to goals, which are not the same as resolutions but present other challenges. If resolutions are difficult to maintain, goals are a worthy destination without a clear map to get there. That’s why the most effective tact might be through something experts call “backward planning.” It’s when you put a system in place by starting at the end.

The case for backward planning

Multiple psychological studies like this one from Cambridge University have shown how backward planning can be more effective in completing tasks because it helps maintain motivation, holds us to a more realistic timeline, and forces us to problem-solve more strategically than in the abstract beginning. It is a way of setting a resolution and a goal all at once, or as the author James Clear puts it in his best-seller Atomic Habits, creating a “process that will determine your progress.”It’s also how many top golf instructors tailor their sessions with students.

“I think with lots of high-end players the way we work is identifying what the goal is and what is the biggest area or thing that keeps them from being able to do it,” said Golf Digest top teacher Tony Ruggiero. “A lot of the teaching I do is reverse engineering.”

Ruggiero says this process works just as well for average players, and since it’s how I’m looking at my goals for 2025, I can share my thinking to explain how it works.

For several years, my goal has to been break 80. But to this point, I’ve just thought about identifying all the things I believe players who shoot in the 70s do better than me. There are no big secrets in there. The answer is pretty much everything. But when you work backward from envisioning what shooting 79 really entails, a sharper process begins to crystallize.

For instance, If I were to backward plan around breaking 80 I’d recognize a few recurring themes from the times I’ve come close, from mental mistakes to poor lag putting. But my biggest issue always returns to a downswing that is too steep and unreliable. For years, I’ve patched over the problem with Band-Aids, but the breakthrough in accepting what I need to do—an awkward grip change with the help of my teacher — came when thinking about why. A shallower swing path that will hold up off the tee and into greens would take the most pressure off the rest of my game.

Having your end goal as a starting point is effective because it forces you to chart not only the plan, but the runway needed to achieve it. I’ve even sketched a timeline. Knowing my golf course doesn’t open until March means I can work on hitting balls into a net for the next two months, and not worry as much about where the ball is actually going.

For many golfers, pinpointing a specific goal might lead to a need to improve body functionality like core strength or hip mobility, which will motivate them to get to the gym. Or maybe in planning ahead to a tournament they recognize they want to get fit for a specific club. The conclusions we draw might even be obvious, but sometimes that’s the point: a different perspective helps produce an answer hiding in plain sight.

With that in mind, I asked a handful of colleagues about a goal, and how they’re working backward from it to create a plan.

Drew Powell

My goal for 2025 is to get back to my lowest-ever handicap, +4. I need to improve two shots, and in order to do that, I need to have better distance control on short and mid irons. To achieve, that, I am working on getting my clubface more square to open in the backswing, instead of slightly shut.

Luke Hooten

To get down to a 14-handicap index from the 16.7 I am now, I’ve decided to focus on raising my driver clubhead speed above 100 mph. A five mph gain means I am going to start dedicated speed training twice a week.

Chris Powers

My No. 1 golf goal for 2025 is to hit the ball, at minimum, 20 yards farther off the tee. And before you say that’s a crazy goal, it’s really not considering I’m poking it around 230 when I used to very consistently hit it over 250-260, which is all you need most courses from the tees I play from. To achieve that, I need to involve my lower body in the golf swing far more than it’s involved now. I think a better fitness regimen specifically focused on that area of my body is the path there.

Luke Kerr-Dineen

I want…no…I need to hit the ball further in 2025. My current average ball speed is in the low 150s. I went to get to the high 160s, with the ability to touch 170 mph. A crushing loss in my club championship, to the eventual champion who hit the ball 30 yards past me and cruised at those ball speeds, brought me to this conclusion. I’ve done speed training, and I’ve tweaked my swing. Both helped, but for me, they return pennies on the dollar. The brutal reality is that I need to get stronger. I need to suck it up, and accept that what is best for my golf is to put the clubs away, and get the barbell out. I reached out to a literal powerlifting gym about 20 minutes down the road from where I live, and linked up with a certified powerlifting coach as a trainer, Steve Sabilla, who can squat more than 500 lbs. He built me a program, and is keeping tabs on my progress.Now I enter the long war: The actually-doing-it-consistently phase. How am I doing? Well it’s early days—I’m only about a month in—but I’ve sustained a three times per week lifting schedule, and am writing while drinking a protein shake following my squat-heavy routine this morning. So far, so good.

This article was originally published on golfdigest.com