Which, I suppose, means that my advice on "how to approach this problem" is "Just do it" -- but it's advice I've been ineffective in applying to myself.

I agree with your post, but there are definitely specific strategies that could be effective. For example, if reading my library were important enough to me, I would go to beeminder, set up a beeminder for number of pages read with some goal of pages per week, and I would be pretty much assured of reading a lot more books.