That's the approach I took as well. For the first year, I just stuck with pinyin, and then once I got comfortable enough conversationally, I started making some effort to learn the characters. I find drawing them out really helps you memorize them so you can recognize them later, so even if you're going to write using pinyin, practising writing is still useful. And it does get easier, because there is a fixed set of symbols that all the characters are composed of. So, once you learn the first batch, it only gets easier from there. But yeah, putting that off is the correct call.