Although I recommend diving into speaking, I think that it's totally fine to ease into studying grammar. That's why the Daily Chain requirement for grammar is super easy: Study for at least one minute per day.

One minute per day? Yeah. And if you take a lesson that day, then you don't need to study grammar at all.

Realistically, no, studying only one minute per day is not going to teach you much Japanese at all. But that's just the minimum. You have to open up your grammar resource of choice and actually focus on it for a whole sixty seconds. Just by doing that, you'll find that it's not always too hard to keep studying that grammar resource for another 1, 2, 10, 75 minutes!

Phase #3's Daily Chain Items are already asking a lot of you. You're trying to study a bunch of flashcards and listen to a full audio lesson every day, in addition to showing up for a face-to-face Japanese lesson every week. That's a lot of work! And I think saying something unrealistic like, “Study grammar 1 hour per day!” is totally ridiculous, and an unrealistic goal has the potential to completely sabotage your studies, because you start to feel like you're failing when you don't achieve that goal, and this can lead to you quitting your studies completely.

Yeah, if you have time, then pore over some of those JapanesePod101 PDFs, read Tae Kim's awesome grammar guide for hours on end, prepare for your weekly lesson the way I described earlier by teaching yourself pretty much the whole thing.

But on the days that you don't have the time, the energy, or the motivation to go above and beyond, just study one minute. One minute—that's all it take for you to get that Blue X on your calendar. You can handle that, yeah?