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You've dropped out of the lower end of Flow, the optimal level of challenge for a task.
You've solved the intellectually interesting nugget, or believe you have, and now all that's left are the mundane and often frustrating details of implementation. Naturally you'll lose some motivation.
So you have to embrace that mundanity, and/or start looking at the project differently.
I agree entirely, having faced exactly the same problem in my day job: some studies are complete, I feel like I have a reasonable guess about the conclusions we can draw from them... maybe I've even presented the main findings at a research conference or two. But a real logjam occurs when it's time to write up and submit for peer review, despite publication being a strict requirement for continuation of my post.
I very much agree with the "flow" analysis: I have an incredible drop-off in motivation once the problem is "solved" to my sa... (read more)