You have to let your interests drive you. I've got 2 kids who are 8 and 6 years old respectively. Prior to having kids, I had my own contracting business, all nighters were a part of my nightly routine and I obsessed about every new technology that came out. I tried to keep this up almost through the birth of my second child before I put myself in the hospital.

That'll put things in perspective.

Now I'm a lot more selective about what I devote my time to learning. I'm skeptical of new language offerings. If a language doesn't give me a reason other than being a different flavor of C for using it, it doesn't even cross my radar. I'm more of a server side, devops, database guy for the most part so I've largely avoided the framework a week craziness in javascript world.

You pick your battles. Something looks cool...great. Does it really add any value beyond my current tools...?

Since getting back into a full time job about 4 years ago there are 2 technologies that have sufficiently captured my interest that I make time for them. Those are PostgreSQL and Elixir.

As it turns out, because of the two of those there's very little that comes on my radar that makes me say...I need to learn that. Most new tech that comes out seems to live in the land of edge cases that I may need one day, but don't have a reason to dive into.

IBM's Watson API's are probably the only thing I could see really grabbing my attention in the last year or so. You pick your battles.