Resisting the Tyranny of the Learning Backlog

Whilst working through The Selenium Guidebook I caught myself doing something that I know I'm sometimes guilty of.
Trying to power through learning to get it "done" and move on to the next thing on my list.

If a course/book outlines a concept or works through an example and then encourages the student to play around with that in their own time, too often I don't do it. I'd rather continue "making progress".

Why? Because as the title I chose for this blog suggests, I allow myself to feel under the pressure of "too much to learn".

That learning backlog in Trello, and the list of tweeted links that I favourite for further investigation, get longer every day. And learning is slow when I mostly have to fit it into late evenings or weekends.

Learning shouldn't be a numbers game
Because of some sort of underlying insecurity, perhaps reinforced by most job ads, I feel that there is too much I don't know to call myself a good Tester. I worry that the majority of Testers are more skilled, and better informed, than I am.

I tend also to beat myself up if it takes me a long time to "get" a topic or exercise in my learning. A "long time" being longer than I imagine other people would need.

But where's my evidence for either of those thoughts? I need to apply the critical thinking skills that I claim to value!

I'm in danger of playing a numbers game with learning. Of thinking it's about quantity not quality.

And yet I know that I'm more likely to absorb material if I spend additional time working and practicing on it myself beyond the given examples. Sometimes I do that, but too often I neglect it to move on to another subject area that I feel I need to know about.
It's not such a surprise then that I can find learning doesn't "stick".

Specialise or generalise - that old question
I've often mulled in the past whether I should narrow down an area of testing to specialise in. (And risk narrowing my opportunities in the process.)

Generally, I do focus on broadly "web"-related learning because that's where I got into testing and where my interests mostly lie. But that's still a big area - and it's not even what I currently do for a day job.

Whilst technical skills are where I feel most lacking, I wouldn't want to neglect studying what I believe to be the core responsibilities of the tester (even if you wouldn't get that impression from most job ads) - thinking skills.

So it can pretty quickly seem like there is "too much to learn" and that I need to touch all of it to be taken seriously.

Intellectually I know that I can't be good at every tool or technology and at all kinds of testing. But emotionally I worry that I always need to be good at more stuff than I am.

Having an overview of multiple topics is no doubt good - but is it better than being well-informed on a few? (Especially when you consider that knowledge of tools/technologies needs to be constantly kept on top of and 'upgraded'?)

The "generalist" T-shaped Tester
I would regard myself as sharing Rob Lambert's view of the value of  the T-shaped Tester. And, having got in to testing quite late in my working life, I have other skills 

But if Rob sees "testing" as representing the vertical bar of the T, where I get hung up on is how far to generalise or to specialise within that "testing" bar.

Am I trying to be a kind of "Unicode character 0166-shaped" Tester?  (Not that that shape quite captures it either!)  With a broad range of technical knowledge?

Unicode character 0166

At the moment it feels like I have unrealistic expectations of my ability to learn.

Perhaps I need the confidence that not knowing something is ok providing you have the capacity and will to learn it when you need it. And that you always bring a set of core skills whatever the context.

Never stop learning
Learning is a continuous process and learning is a motivator for me. I wouldn't want to be in a situation where there was nothing new to learn.

But it shouldn't be stressful. Working through a learning backlog should be a source of pleasure and not a cloud hanging over me.

I need to make that mental shift, and maybe that requires narrowing my ambitions.