The trigger

In previous years, I usually spent my year end overseas so the routine was always packed as there were so many things to explore. But this year was different. We are stuck at home (in fact, most of the world). So I want to make sure my holiday time is well spent.

Holiday calendar

I went a little overboard to create this holiday calendar. It’s nothing fancy, just a Google calendar with somewhat carefully planned activities to do.

It looks surprisingly more packed than I thought. I do keep a list of things I want to do in Notion at weekly / monthly level. Hence, the list of course doesn’t account for daily recurring events like podcast listening. Only when I put thing in day perspective, it’s so clear that I would have a somewhat busy holiday.

Korean leaning calendar

One of my “conveniently” forgotten tasks is Learning Korean. I struggled with my learning journey for the past months as I felt bored with just doing mock exams. So I took last week Saturday to plan out what I really want to achieve and how I can get there.

I figured out that I don’t really have a concrete plan for my learning to achieve my goal. And my goal of a person who casually learn Korean out of interest is different from those of serious learners. Doing mock exam one after another is not really relevant and bores me out so fast. Now that I wrote down what I want, it’s clear where I should focus. I decided to work on grammar, vocabulary and reading with certain topics like daily life or entertainment.

I then set up a detailed plan in Notion using the calendar view for 2 weeks. I wanted to try out for 2 weeks first and see if this DIY syllabus works.

For each day, I plan to commit 30 mins — 1 hour depending on my mood. There’s no specific time, but most likely, it’s gonna be morning. The content of each day is also researched and written down. This exercise take me 1hr to plan For example:

Content is sourced from my favourite Korean learning places like Talk To Me in Korean, howtostudykorean.com or articles in Naver. I feel excited to have the plan that seems realistic and fun to me, instead of following a rigid plan as if I’m going to take a test.

Updates:

Few days in and things are looking good. As it’s holiday, I don’t need to strictly follow the time but I try to make time for the tasks planned for that day. There’s a slight change in Korean planning as it seems to understand a 7-min conversation would take me a good 1-1.5hr to go through and understand. So I have to expand make my listening as 2-day- lessons instead of just one.