Tldr; Think of myself as a product, and try to use a sort of agile development style to improve myself. I assign myself "sprints" (one or two at a time, one to two weeks each) and basically during my free time when I think "What should I do now?" I just do the sprint and it takes the pressure off. I've still been doing it since I wrote the above post and it's been working pretty well. I've read 5 novels in the past two months or so (EDIT: for context, more than I'd read in the past year), and I've tried a variety of what I call "personal sprints" that include things like "Wake up at the exact same time for two weeks", or "Say yes to all invitations for things for two weeks". I sort of have the mentality now that "The sprint is the law" and it's helped me have a level of discipline that I haven't achieved in the past. It's really fun because it's low pressure and experiment-based ("Let's try making excessive eye contact for a week, lol") and if something doesn't work out, you didn't spend much time doing it anyways.
Another less related thing is that I read that habit forming is sort of like a muscle, and once you form one habit, it can become easier to form others. So for a little while I was doing habit "layering" where I'd have a priority list for habits and basically as long as I did the top thing on my list, I was happy, even if I didn't get the others. Gradually I moved to the top two things, and so on.
Hope that helps.