Absolutely. I can't tell you how many times I've been starting at a project that I basically know how to do, but it's got a bunch of moving parts that I need to account for. I'll just stare at the screen, drink more coffee, read HN, basically do anything besides actually work on it, because it's too big and unactionable. Some of this is actually useful brain-organization time, but some is just time wasting.

Eventually I'll get the bright idea to make a notes doc listing all the things that are bothering me. Just writing them down gets them out of my nebulous headspace into a permanent record, which inevitably makes it less scary - and before you know it's I'm either halfway to a runbook or technical design, and it turns out this project actually will only take a day or two once I have all the prep work done.