Maybe a bit of an update would be in order 
To quote Ali Muhammad:
Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.
meaning that our plans often don’t stand a chance when confronted with reality. And so has the situation been in my case.
Jeremy shares so much great information and it is coming at such a pace that even if I were to spend all my waking hours only on this course, I wonder if I would be satisfied with my progress .
As is, there are so many things I would like to try out and look into that I feel I am doing the bare minimum and still am not caught up with recent lectures.
Someone needs to get into a time machine and slap some sense into Radek from a couple of weeks ago! How was that plan even remotely narrow? What definition of laser focus is that?! 
Let’s say my definition of laser focus evolved and it entails: much less time reading, much less time watching, much more time coding.
Attempting doing this might have been my biggest mistake to date in this course, or a touch of - deranged but still - genius. The jury is still out
(This relates to the project I describe here - essentially implementing the training loop from scratch, building functionality to work with models, etc. Learning a lot of PyTorch / Python which is good - maybe - but at the cost of doing actual deep learning)
First part is done, box is up and running, second part - not sure if worth pursuing any more given how little time is left. Even if I were to figure out how to train on the 50 GB of data, I doubt this would get me very far in the competition. Too little, too late.
Failed on that one miserably numerous times.
I might be getting there
In summary, I think I am learning a lot and am potentially moving at the highest pace that is still relatively reasonable. As I get to only be me and not someone else, whether I would be better off if I were a better programmer / knew more Python / PyTorch to start with - probably, but none of this is an option, and accepting that I have to learn things that might seem very simple is the right way to go.
Would I be better off if I didn’t jump into peeking behind the curtains and used higher level functionality vs putting things together myself? Maybe - but if this is the case than this is a lesson I still haven’t and need to learn. I already have come a long way since watching the first lecture with Jeremy and it is probably hard to imagine what a hopeless theoretician I was back then (especially that going the theory route without practice is the easiest way to go astray, but what else to do as no other resource as far as I know bridges the gap between not knowing and doing as this course).
As is, approaching this as a marathon is the best I can do. Willing to go at this full speed for the next couple of months as I honestly feel I finally am devoting my time to the things that matter, I have a relatively okay-ish handle on learning. If doing so leads to nowhere apart from me learning something I always wanted to learn - which I feel is by far the most likely outcome, then be it.