While I absolutely love the work I do, one major downside is I don’t really get any time to experiment anymore or even read up on what others are building. 

Trying to set aside and commit to a minimum of 2 hours a day for it. Any other advice on how to stay up-to-date?

Curation engines

For me this means a few different things - it could mean curating twitter lists, bookmarks etc and keeping things lean that way 
- or using others as a means of curation, I think it’s possible to keep up to date with 75% of what’s going on in a domain if you follow the right 10% of people