My entire life has been spent dealing with this issue.

One of the unavoidable facts of life is uncertainty. You don't know whether any particular course of action will get you where you want to go. A lot of times, you're not even sure you know where you want to go.

Let's call these two issues "uncertainty of effort" and "uncertainty of goals".

For goals, there are externally-derived goals, and internally-derived ones. You can put this on a spectrum. Your dad tells you you need to get a job, you know you need a job and independence and all that, but the fact that your dad is hounding you places this on the 'externally-derived' part of the spectrum.

Essentially, when you wait until the last minute, the goal is pushed all the way to the external side of the equation. What you want is the capacity to act on internally-derived goals, progress on these feels like you're "going places," and "getting your shit together," and all that.

Pushing goals over in the internal direction is all about finding motivation. The motivation to accomplish external goals is clear, it's outside of yourself, you know exactly what's going to happen if you put it off any longer, you'll lose your job / house whatever. The motivation to accomplish internally-derived goals has to come from within.

This is where I find the thinking behind Maslow's hierarchy of needs useful. Sit and meditate for a bit to locate where on the hierarchy you are right now. Do you need to eat something? Do you need social interaction? Treat this need as a box you have to fill and go fill the box with whatever it is you've just determined you needed. Congratulations, you have just accomplished an internally-derived goal. Finding life satisfaction is really a system of boxes that need to all be filled before you can check this one off.

You can sit and think and come up with various types of needs. You'll have immediate needs and long-term needs. Also needs where the path to getting what you want is clear, and needs where the path isn't so clear. List these all on a sheet of paper along with their classification. Immediate / long-term, clear path / unclear.

Lack of motivation derives from not satisfying immediate needs. Your very subconscious is resisting you, and it's always a bad idea to act against your subconscious. You need to identify what it is your subconscious wants and then you'll be naturally motivated to go get it. Something that nerdier types always neglect is social interaction. Also sunshine and activity. Once you've identified something that sounds nice, take the easiest and most available path to getting it. There's no point in challenging yourself if you have a lack of motivation, unless it's actually a challenge that you need.

Finally, there's effort uncertainty. Once you fix the motivation problem, you'll run into the next issue, that you have no idea what to do to accomplish the goals that you have. You have several tools for tackling this. The first and most useful that I reach for, I call fishing for lessons. You don't know what will work, but you will have a model of how the world works. That model is wrong in some way, keeping you from what you want. You just have to find out how it's wrong.

Root around in your brain until you come up with a statement like, "If I do X, it should get me closer to Y because of Z." Now you have a testable expression. You have 3 relationships there, between X and Y, between X and Z, and between Y and Z. One of two or all three of these relationships that you think are causal are in fact not related at all, and it's your job to find out.

It doesn't even have to relate to your goals. You can also analyze the reasons why you think you can't accomplish your goal. "If I ask Marcy out, she'll turn me down because she only likes jocks." My guess would be that last part of the statement is false, and would be the first thing that I'd test. Not by asking her out, but by asking her what kinds of guys she goes out with. You can test all the things you believe about Marcy by talking to her, more social people call that "getting to know her," and is probably the best approach one can think of if you were interested in her romantically.

We feel daunted by goals that we don't feel we can accomplish because the way we think about the world is inconsistent and wrong. The way out is to substitute those wrong beliefs with correct ones, and the only way to find out the correct ones is to let the world tell you. Everybody says failure is the best, but what they don't say is that failure doesn't have to suck. If you do things for the express purpose of testing out whether the way you believe the world is actually works or not, finding out you're wrong is a happy occasion, because that directly leads into more goal-accomplishment ability.