to give you an idea of what I mean, I'm checking bluesky, reddot, HN, youtube, instagram, tiktok, discord basically every hour. every morning, lunch, and evening I'm checking my email where I receive about a dozen or so newsletters either weekly or daily. a few times a week (usually weekends) I'm browsing github and arxiv for the whatever random thought or interest is the flavor of the week (lately its been on EOE techniques and classifiers). This has lead me to collect the names of a good number of authors I trust and that appear to be thought leaders in the space.
I don't think this approach is good at all, in fact, it feels neurotic and I think its an unhealthy obsession borne from my adhd, but its kept me going for the last 3ish years and I don't feel the slightest bit burnt out. personally I find the whole field of AI/ML to be immensely exciting so I think that part of it is a huge driver for how I personally stay up-to-date.
ideally I would offload a lot of these activities to a research agent and tbh I "plan" to eventually, same way I plan to gut short form videos and social media from my life and get 8hrs of sleep. Eventually.
i haven't yet seen tooling that makes me think, "wow, this is the missing link, i need this" -- not since claude code started working very well with sub-agents.
as an example, i built tooling that lets me open claude code and say 'add MSP430FR2476TRHBR to the library' and a few minutes later there's a schematic symbol and footprint in my kicad library with parameter fields consistent with my organization's internal standards. i'll be waiting a while for anthropic to add that feature to claude code.