Find a partner for projects.

Knowing that someone is waiting for a result is pretty motivational.

That was great! Now that was brilliant as long as you are the kind of person who can trust your own intuition.

I read some of The Paradox of Choice years back.

Whether or not the guy's thesis is valid, he does a decent job of iterating through the hangups we have about making decisions. Plus, he does a makes a reasonable case that the small increase in satisfaction stemming from a painstakingly-considered excellent choice isn't worth agonizing over the decision itself.

For me, just being able to identify decision-making problems makes them easier to handle. So maybe it will be worth your time.

He (Barry Schwartz) has given a TED talk, too. I haven't seen it:
http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice?language=en

It could be an act of rebelling against mortality: "I don't have time to do everything I wanna do, so I'm gonna do nuuuuuuuthing!!!!"

It could also be a conflict of generalism versus specialism. If you're similar to me, you have many general interests, but you also want to specialize in all of them to experience a sense of accomplishment, but this is impossible.

What draws a lot of us into the computer world is that a computer is a powerful tool to do many things.

What makes choice difficult for us is being too concerned with the lost opportunities that would result from any decision we make.

For myself, I realise it's better to do something rather than nothing, and that I need to focus more on that which yields immediate benefits to me.

But one also needs a bit of fun so even if you spend some time learning something you're probably never going to put to practical use... if you enjoy learning it... why not? And it keeps the mind active... and the older we get, the more important this becomes.

Thanks everyone. +1