Overcoming Project Paralysis

I'm fighting passion project paralysis.

I want to work on an open source project, but I can't seem to find the energy to get over that initial inertia of choosing a project, setting up the environment, etc.

Whenever this happens, I start worrying: what happened to the passion that I used to have? Why do I not have a project that I just want to hack on? Am I just complacent with the software I have, since it pretty much accomplishes what I want it to do?

To overcome the paralysis, I sometimes play little games to get myself to just start: I'll use a random project picker that I wrote, and then work on the project that is picked for me; or I'll listen to a podcast and pick one of the problems that is brought up by one of the hosts and start working on it. But too often, I'll spend most of my time just getting my head around the project that was randomly picked, or I'll move on to the next podcast (cause you can never listen to too many, right?), and nothing gets done.

Sometimes, I find that procrastinating is more enjoyable...argh.

Sometimes, I remember one of the questions that always bother me when I am actually working. But that is the subject of a future post.