I've found that thinking love/hate is not sufficiently granular for most problems and rarely suggestive of many solutions. It can be good for making very high l

I've found that thinking love/hate is not sufficiently granular for most problems and rarely suggestive of many solutions. It can be good for making very high level emotionally charged decisions like whether you want to even stay in school or not, but when it comes to implementing those decisions, you often need to be more specific about your feelings to figure out exactly what needs to change. There is a chart in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's classic Flow, that I've found enligtening. It shows the "flow channel", the desirable state where the activity seems friction-free, surrounded by anxiety on one side and boredom on the other. Most people don't think of activities this way, where the goal is a mean rather an an extreme. I've found that every instance of procrastination or avoidance in my life stems from anxiety or boredom irrespective of things like desire, enjoyment, or willpower, while all of the things I do get done are things that I don't feel much anxiety or boredom about, likewise irrespective of desire, enjoyment or willpower. (Those factors only seem to come into play with planning what to do, not in actually doing them.) So it follows that the way to get things done is to figure out whether the problem is anxiety or boredom and then do what you can to counterbalance it back towards the flow channel. If you're procrastinating on something because you find it boring, the way to become motivated is to make it more exciting. Add constraints, make it more challenging, tighten deadlines, expand scope, batch repetitive tasks, turn necessary goals into desirable ones, etc. If you're procrastinating on something because it makes you anxious, the way to become motivated is to make it less exciting. Remove constraints, reduce the challenge, loosen deadlines, break up tasks into small pieces, reduce the harm of mistakes, reduce risk, etc. What that means specifically depends on what bores you or causes anxiety and how much control you have over circumstances, but I think there is always something you can do on a practical and tactical level to bring any activity towards that channel where you don't have to force yourself into doing it.