I need an efficient way to catch up with all the work done in my field of interest I have an academic problem that I'm very interested in and want to explore the related research fields. Of course no researcher knows everything going on in a field but I feel I know far too less to go for a PhD right now. I'm in the last year of my undergraduate program right now.

What I did so far is...


Read a lot of papers. They build on a large corpus of knowledge so before understanding the theoretical details I have to read all those somewhat related publications.
Read advances papers for better understanding. This works quite well.
Organize links to all interesting publications and other material in a document. Not sure if it's really useful though. I haven't had time to read things from there I didn't remember anyway yet.
Start implementing the ideas and algorithms as computer programs. Doing so is good to validate my understanding but also takes a lot of time and it would be good to get some help when I'm stuck.
Join mailing lists and groups and talk to researchers. It's more networking than information.
Take somewhat related classes at other universities since there is not much at mine. However, there are no whole courses on the problem I'm interested in since it's too specific.


This all is a lot of fun. It also obviously takes a considerable amount of time. Do you have any advice to more efficiently organize and catch up with the current state of my academic field of interest?
the following points are based on my experience, on how to start learning about a research topic from scratch: 


Common Knowledge: First thing you do is to learn the common knowledge. This is the basic that makes sense of the whole field and logically true. For this, you can read general available resources, such as books or Wikipedia. For example, if I want to start to do a research on operating systems in a distributed setting, I go and get a book about Linux, and a general book about distributed computing. Then moving on to computer cluster for example or something else, I see what my interests and curiosity takes me.  

Note on 1: Don't think you are not reading research so you are not progressing. Common knowledge now was a research topic of the past, and you must learn them pretty well. 
Earliest Resources(s) You Can Find: This might take a little time, but you need to find the first resources to the field. You should see how and for what this field is started. 
Important Papers of the Last 20 Years: Find the 'top 20' papers of the last 20 years. See what they cited and what they contributed. 

Note on 3: The last step will definitely take you for a ride for some time. And this is the whole point. You need to learn how to read and write research in a field during a Ph.D. and therefore this step is very important.  
Day to Day Updates: You can join different mailing lists of different research topics, and also you can use online services, that let you know automatically via email, based on your specified keyword(s). 


Conclusion: Learning the research topic and its history takes time; however it is essential to make you a good researcher who can contribute in the field. These things can be achieved by the following mentioned points.