My manager's boss just commited on a delivery date a month from now. We dont know what is to be delivered, nor does the client. We are supposed to work on a platform that we know nothing about. And of course the catchphrase is : yeah just use big data and spark. I'm dying...

A question for people who are active on the open source community or anyone who succeeds in crwating some small personal coding projects.
How do you do it?
Do you have any advice on how to be more efficient when working on personal projects?
Each time I get an idea i try to start it but just give up or get discouraged by some related setups.

Also how do you find interesting existing projects to contribute to?

Please help. I wanna do more but never do anything. Am I alone in this situation?? I dont wanna get stuck in this loop anymore.