In Stone Soup I talk about using salami tactics to cut a large problem down into manageable chunks.
Another way to get things done is to do what we did in the XING development area we labelled the chunks of the overall development challenge into different size chunks and altered their priorities accordingly and also distributed different pieces to different parts of the team according to size.
Stones and sand size stuff like tiny visual or other development changes we did routinely and larger Features and feature sets we did in queues on a longer term basis.
So too when you look at all you wish to achieve consider what is routine and what the are the individual projects you want to get done to achieve your overall goals.
This way you can make almost anything manageable for you and your team. If you don't have a team go get one even in studying it is more effective to study as part of a team than as an individual.
Above all try to have some fun with anything you do.
