Thank you, I appreciate your perspective. Sounds like you've worked on this problem yourself by working at it from a different direction, namely starting from what you want to do/why you want it and moving back towards the thing to be doing.
Anyway, given that, I can work backwards from "what action(s) are most likely to lead to somebody paying me even 1 dollar for any of this?" And if I keep that "time to first dollar" in mind as a north-star of sorts, it helps me focus. To a degree.
In reality I don't always actually know what is going to minimize "time to first dollar", and sometimes I just say "screw it" and work on what seems like the most fun. So it's a really rough sort of heuristic at best. This is probably one reason why we aren't making any money yet. But that's OK, because other goals besides "make money" include "learn cool new stuff" and "have fun."