[proginthebox]

I see. Well, you have a point, but the OP did specifically ask for a plan like that Susan Fowler's blog post. And I am an applied mathematician working mostly on computational physics and I can attest to the requirements I mentioned.

But your advice has a point, just going through books mindlessly is not motivation enough/ can lead to wandering. And it is always good to have specific tasks at hand. Like, solving a particular ordinary differential equations numerically.