I'm a 2 years experienced Software Developer working in a small product-based company. Here, my salary is quite low as compared to industry standards. My office timings are 9 to 6:30 and I spend around 4 hours in total to travel everyday to office. I can't live near the office because of the poor food quality available there and costly rents. I get holidays on every Sundays and even Saturdays. My goal is to get a job in a big product based company. Although I get the time to study on holidays but on the normal weekdays, it becomes very tiring to prepare.
From last few months, I am studying CTCI as the starting point of preparation and then I have planned to switch to Leetcode completely after finishing CTCI. Although I am participating in the Leetcode Contests every weekend, but my progress has been really slow. In CTCI, I observed that if I try to find my own solution and then look at the chapter end's solution, it is very time-consuming process. So, I started looking at the solutions first and then I code it up in editor making sure I understand everything. It takes more than a week for me to finish a single chapter in CTCI and as a result, I've reached Trees and Graphs chapter in CTCI despite after starting the preparation on 14th July.
But, the thing is that because of so much lack of time, even when I watch TV or try to entertain myself in free time whether on holidays or whether while travelling, a guilt feeling has been arising significantly inside me that I'm wasting my time and it creates a lot of stress in my mind sometimes. And because of this slow progress, I want to know what different strategy should I adopt to achieve my goal. Can anyone offer a valuable advice/tips/suggestions on that? I would greatly appreciate your time.