In my free time / personal projects, I've slowly been moving towards this mentality as well. Whenever I start some new, long, dreadful task, I always ask myself

In my free time / personal projects, I've slowly been moving towards this mentality as well. Whenever I start some new, long, dreadful task, I always ask myself, "how can I make this as fun as possible", then start creating better and pseudo-GUIs (Trello or Jupyter usually being the first iteration!) to help me get the job done!