After reading a paper, you should download only those references related to your current research (e.g. influenza) rather than all references, which can make you focus on your research and avoid wasting time. There may exist some interest and influential papers related to other infectious diseases (such as measles, dengue etc.) in the reference list. It will take you lots of time to sort out those papers; however, you don't have time to read them since plenty of papers on influenza are already waiting for you to read. What do you benefit from doing so? Hence the wise strategy is to just leave them alone. You would get the chance to read them again if you conduct research on such topics later.
While reading a book, don't try to memorize those sentences. Instead try to understand the concepts, logic, key points, and know where to find them when you would like to refer to these knowledge or to writing something. This will speed up the reading process, make you finish reading a book quickly, and turn you into a positive feed back of reading.
When you following the most recent papers, you would find lots of interesting papers in other fields. You should narrow your interests and focus on the papers relevant to your current research topic (e.g., influenza). Don't waste time on downloading those papers and reading them. Focus on your current project and finish it, then you can start another new project. By completing projects one by one, you would finally find yourself have done great jobs and make huge progresses.
Only update the softwares when necessary, such as you need to use the new features to accomplish your compuation. For some sofewares that are diffcult to install, you should get used to the old version and update it only when you need the newest functionalities.