There are four major themes to this next 108 days.

• Chinese
• Exercise
• Writing
• Work

Chinese

I’ve been studying Chinese on and off for over 20 years now (a lot more off than on). The problem with my current level of Chinese is that it’s “good enough”. It’s good enough to do all of the things I need to do. I’m really not happy with “good enough” though. I’m going to work on getting near-native fluency when it comes to reading and listening. My spoken and written ability will naturally increase with my reading and listening comprehension.

I’m going to spend 1 to 3 hours a day studying. My method will be as follows…

• Reviewing cards 1 to 1,500 from the 6,000 most frequently used characters Anki deck I created. I’ll only add new characters from vocabulary words I’m learning until those first 1,500 are “mature” (memorized).
• Studying one chapter a week from Practical Audio-Visual Chinese 3. There’s an amazing Anki deck which I’ll use for vocabulary memorization. Each chapter has roughly 100 new vocabulary words. I’m going to try to memorize the vocabulary one week and then go through the lesson the following week.
• Memorize the Chinese radicals. There’s an Anki deck for this as well.

I’ll make adjustments as I go. If one chapter a week is too much, I’ll switch to every two weeks (for example). I’m also going to record myself reading the dialogs for each chapter and will include that in the weekly updates.

Exercise

I’m going to go back to running every day for the next 108. I successfully did this in Cycle 4 and loved it. I’ll probably add more to the routine as time goes by (like stretching), but I’m just going to focus on the running to get things started. I didn’t do much running this last 108 so it’ll take a couple weeks to get back into the routine.

Writing

For now I just want to make writing a daily habit with no other strings attached to it. I’ll make it a 500 words per day minimum and see what happens from there. This is 500 words a day for myself. The writing could be about anything. A journal entry, a blog post, an article about something interesting to me. Whatever it is doesn’t matter. I just want to work on the habit.

Work

I’m going to spend some time every Monday to Friday looking for work. I have the most busted up, random looking work history between being interested in a million different things and being bipolar. I’m going to work on finding stable work that I can dynamically increase and decrease depending on where my energy is. I have a feeling the most suitable kind of work is going to be writing related.

Weekly Updates

I’m going to commit to creating short weekly updates in the form of a blog post and video. They’ll just be quick recaps of what went down over the week.