In the information age we live in, it's so easy to be overwhelmed with the sheer amount of reading material we have at our disposal. I love learning new things, as well as improving my understanding of topics I'm already familiar with. In the little time I have to learn/read, I find myself falling into a trap of jumping around a lot. Some days I find myself watching Machine Learning lecture videos, some days reading up on computer architecture, design patterns, and the list goes on.<p>I'm very interested to learn how other people cope with this problem. There is too much to learn, but not enough time...
Have a goal based learning approach. Tie your learning directly to a project that you are intending to finish. That way - your learning has some end goal and does not become an end in itself. Also, aggregate what you want to read before hand and sort them into related things and read them together.
It's only a problem if it is keeping you from some goal. Example: If you're doing a research report on a certain president and you find yourself reading up on a dozen other interesting presidents, well that's a problem because it keeps you from finishing your report.
On the other hand, if you are interested in genetic algorithms and you wind up reading about real genetics, epigentics and then Dawkin's book "The Selfish Gene", I don't see how that is bad.
Organize interesting information on subjects that you are not immediately working on. Use a product like Evernote and to organize the different pieces of information into groups on the same topic. They when you are done with the current subject that you are trying to get you head around you can move on to the next one and pull back up all those old interesting bits of information on the subject.