I found myself this past weekend with an unused month of personal Copilot tokens and a dream: code up a Visual Studio Code extension that would take my tortured, bizarre, etc. notes to new depths of over-engineering.. Fifty percent of my quota later, I now have a Textmate grammar for the language, extensions to the language that make it capable of expressing basically everything going on in my life in a single tree, syntax highlighting and checking in VS Code, a panel that shows open to-do items with a button that lets me sync my notes to GitHub, and maybe one or two other things I've forgotten in my excitement.

I suspect you have some small scraps of time during your workday in order to try to learn a subject that seems insurmountably large. The first suggestion I would make is to adopt a time management process, particularly the Pomodoro Technique, which allows you to break up large tasks into small ones and make the most of small, discrete chunks of time.

Second, you need to know what you will tackle in those small chunks of time. I’m sure there are other ways of breaking it up, but I might break learning test automation into these broad parts...

Your brain and body have positioned your audience as potential threats and have prepared you to either fight them or run in panic from the room. Since you shouldn't do either of these things, some adjustments are in order.

In much the same way that the Pomodoro method is like miniature Scrum for time management, I find that Scrum can also be used effectively for personal change.

If, for you, a turkey sandwich can't compete against General Tso's, then bringing in that sandwich is setting yourself up to fail. So, there are two ways to resolve the problem: either find a way to exclude all those other delicious, convenient options, or make your lunch better. The first way is doomed to fail, because we can rationalize anything when we are hungry. The second way, however, is actually pretty easy, and to illustrate, here are the strategies I've found helpful in doing just that.

My time in the OMSCS program has taught me to take advantage of every opportunity to stay on top of the Udacity lectures that we are responsible for watching every week. To create another avenue for doing this, I looked for a way to convert those lectures into audio files so that I could listen to them as I commute.