Getting the topics for bitdevs is something I would be doing anyway, I try to read every mailing list post, go through various github projects and find interesing PRs, and look for interesting discussion on twitter and other platforms.

After we have our list the hard part is going back and re-reading everything to get caught up to speed. Normally this takes just a couple of hours, a lot of things are just repeats/extensions of things we've talked about before, so it's just the newer things (like a new soft fork proposal) that I have to spend time on try and understand, which normally just takes 1-2 reads of the mailing list post + discussions.