A big part of the learning process is learning what your own thresholds and limits are--lists and organization are necessary tools but they are hardly the substance of scholarship--the problem that you face is that you must discover how to create and re-create the situation in which you do your best work--the pressure that you feel is important, because it tells you that you are beyond your limit right now--

When you want to play music that you can't play, you have to create more space for yourself, eliminate extranous and superfluous movements, optimize fingerings, polish your attack, slow the tempo til it is maneagable, then build it up to speed again--Wnen everything falls apart, you step back and rethink it in a way that you can keep together--If you play music, you can do this, and if you can do this, you can apply the approach to anything else (paticularly academics) to very good effect--