Can I use this now/today for something immediate? Do I otherwise think it's cool enough to play with taking time away from other activities?

That's most of it... I tend to read tech articles, documentation, etc pretty voraciously. I'm okay-ish at remembering names, or at least enough to remember what to look for if I need something and read about a good fit a few years ago. So I tend to continue to take in what I can, staying somewhat shallow outside of what's in front of me, or otherwise has my interest.

Right now, my secondary interests are around rust and adapting legacy tech (BBS Doors, Telnet, etc), so if I look into something more, that's where I'm more inclined to do it. I'm also a bit lazy.

I'll dig fairly deep in terms of what's in front of me. I'm actively working on a green C# backend so I've brought in FastEndpoints (new to me, but similar to other tech I've used) while also relying heavily on Dapper and MS-SQL Server and Grate for migrations. The use of C# and SQL Server are outside my control, as is deploying to Windows. That said, having some awareness of the ecosystem over the years lets me be able to bring in newer options that fit well over time.

By contrast, if I were working in a JS target (Node, Cloudflare, etc) I'd probably be leaning heavily into Hono+Zod+OpenAPI libraries. Again, relatively current in that space.

In the end, I just try to have awareness of what is shaping up in the communities and trying not to dive into anything I can't make use of now.