I got my MSc 10 years ago. Anyway, I'm not sure how these would apply to your situation (wanting both MSc and PhD), but basically I immediately enrolled for post-graduate studies afterwards. I didn't pick any topic for dissertation or anything like that - for the next 7 years I basically did all the required coursework. Typically it was like 1 or 2 seminar courses each semester, so it was typically one afternoon a week. I didn't really have a study plan as such - seminar courses were interesting for their own sake because the courses were structured around stuff that people were really doing.
For example, one course was about P2P networking, DHT algorithms and so on, and a group came in with a variant of Bittorrent that organised the chunks so that BT could be used for streaming. (This was like 2005-2006). At the time, it was a very good way to keep oneself informed on the latest developments without sacrificing too much time.
Anyway, in 2009, I had basically done all the courses, and partially by chance I got laid off with a rather nice severance package, at which point the professor who's going to oversee my defense on Friday called me and asked if I'd like to come and work in his team as a researcher and create the actual thesis. At the same time an ex-colleague (who had been at the same company) got in touch and basically told me that the academia is going to do squat with the CCIE - they have this little network shop going on and if I like, I could work for them as much as my time would permit. The arrangement worked out rather beautifully....for example, I could incorporate real-world problems from our customers to my research work as well.
So the only real advice I can give - unless you are really going for full-steam career in academia and a tenured professor option - stay in touch with industry somehow (part time, consultancies, even participate in trade shows if nothing else). In academia, it is really easy to seal yourself to that ivory tower that has no bearing on real-world issues and lives from one grant money to the next. Even in completely academic circles, it's possible to maintain that touch - besides everything else, for me it meant regular trips to IETF, which is not something you can exactly classify as a conference. (And at least I got my name as an author on a single RFC to show for it).