I've had a problem for more than a year now and I seem to be coming to grips with it as of late.

As a CS student / junior engineer there is an absolute abundance of subjects that I either a) need to cover or b) want to cover. Ranging from the theoretical, say discrete mathematics, to the practical, starting a business.

All of these different topics, when made accessible immediately and in most cases for free or at a little cost (libraries, MOOCs, youtube videos, books, etc), result in a sort of "information paralysis". There's too much to do, too easily, and I end up doing nothing.

This really got my attention yesterday morning when I was watching an Algorithms lecture, and my girlfriend pointed out that the lecturer looked familiar. That's because I had watched the same lecture 12 months ago and she caught a glimpse then also.

I could have done the course twice over, if I had stuck with it and not gotten distracted. But I didn't, and 12 months later I know nothing more than I did back then about this subject. This scares me.

This scares me especially because I'm at the start of a 4-5 month stretch where I absolutely need to cover 4 highly technical subjects, on my own and unguided, to continue my studies. (Details omitted for brevity)

I've faced this dilemma before and tried to tackle it on my own, and failed. So I'm posting here in the hops that some other students / professionals have encountered a similar problem and found a solution. It may not be perfect, but it might give me a step in the right direction.

Thanks in advance for any comments.

Michael