I don’t use DepthFirstLearning, but rather AstarLearning, meaning, that I have a learning goal in mind all the time (since I can remember) and try to learn everything, that contributes to this goal (minimizes the distance to the goal).
The goal is motivated by a curiosity how things work or could be made to work (at an abstract scale, including social problems). The distance to this goal is measured by the usefulness of the knowledge to achieve this.
Interestingly I have found, that learning this way all the pieces of information quickly form a coherent picture and fit together. Though I have to admit, that this might be my subjective impression and I hope that this beautiful picture is not an artifact of my mind.
As to the personal usefulness of this approach, I think, that it provides me with a clear profile as well as an in-depth expertise in my field.
There are times where I really just read stuff sometimes for the fun of it and sometimes when I am exhausted. But even then I track it and all suring takes about 10% of my online time.
Victim? No. I track the time taken and by it and it is seldom ‘random googling’.
From an old post of mine on c2 ( http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BreadthFirstLearning ):
There are times where I really just read stuff sometimes for the fun of it and sometimes when I am exhausted. But even then I track it and all suring takes about 10% of my online time.