Really? Just stop for a couple of days. Experience is valuable in years, if you don't touch a computer this weekend, you won't lose anything. Sooner or later, the fun will come back. I know it can be difficult to enjoy free time from personal experience, but not spending every minute you have on improving yourself is fine, too. Just think what 70-year-old you would say if you forgot living because you focussed on refactoring code.

I know how a lot of people don't like to see links from Reddit, but I keep a couple of motivational pieces around for myself whenever I get bummed or burned out on anything. Maybe you can make use of them.

1. My favorite piece of motivational advice (Reddit link, Veuwer alternative link)

2. Arnold Schwarzenegger (Youtube link)

My personal advice:

1. Do something productive every day. It doesn't matter how little it is, so long as you can get yourself to do something, you're still making progress.
2. Take breaks for yourself whenever you need them. Exercise, mindfulness, or even meditation can all be good approaches to stress relief.
3. Get enough sleep and don't try to binge at learning things; it'll make you burn out faster, and you won't retain the memory as well. Short periods of effort every day over a long period of time will always trump heavily focused, short-term effort. Neuroscience has backed this for a while now, and you can take a brief class about it here.
4. If nothing else works, you might want to reevaluate your intentions and goals. Things may have changed, and you may have subconsciously realized that you'd rather be doing/learning something entirely different.
5. Most of all, don't hate yourself or feel guilty over it. I've been there plenty of times, and it's never worth it.

I try to learn something new if I'm feeling burnt out. If I have a deadline I'll do really small easy tasks first and work my way up.

taken from here

Fuck motivation. it’s a fickle and and unreliable little dickfuck and isn’t worth your time.

Better to cultivate discipline than to rely on motivation. force yourself to do things. force yourself to get up out of bed and practice. Force yourself to work. Motivation is fleeting and it’s easy to rely on because it requires no concentrated effort to get. Motivation comes to you, and you don’t have to chase after it.

Discipline is reliable, motivation is fleeting. The question isn’t how to keep yourself motivated. It’s how to train yourself to work without it.

What exactly are you trying to learn? What's your experience in the field? Sounds like you might've hit a wall that's a little too tricky to just jump. I'd be happy to try to help point out some footholds.

Not coding for me, but when I feel a lack of motivation to work, I think of all the money a company is wasting on me. Then I realize that little bit of money I made doing nothing could very well be the last bit of money I receive. I get back to work really quick.

This is what will motivate you to get off your ass

I take a few days off. When I can't take a few days off, I find that if I have a rigid schedule it helps and I don't feel guilty about not coding. For example I can take off at three pm, and I will, even if I am mid line in the code. Also something that helps burn out is I set a timer for 25 minutes at a time, when it goes off, even at mid command I just stop working for a few minutes.

If you're really at the start of a real burnout it's like your mind just can't take it anymore, and it's something that needs to be like that for months and gets worse as time goes on, with productivity much lower than used to be, and so on. You can do other unrelated things but feel almost aversion to the activity causing the burnout. And it's not just lazy or normally tired or whatever, those are different things.

Been through that this year. In my opinion what you can do is rest from coding. Take some time off, and I mean even a month or so if needed be.

I understand not everyone can do that because you have to afford a living but I think it's either at least taking it easy or just staying unproductive and perhaps getting even worse as time passes, and if you're like me also getting into a bad mood because of it.

Just need to find your source of inspiration. Mine is gaming. I like play and read gaming dev blogs. Anything other than enterprise programming.

Drugs. Not hard ones mind you. And not 100% of the time. If I find myself hitting a road block, I turn to drugs. Not the best advice I know... But you asked what I do. I don't suggest anyone else do as me necessarily. But yeah, Provigil is pretty good for that, or Adderal slow release.

I like the video game suggestion tho. Could be that I program game stuff but I don't think that'd work for me lol.

I get the same way. Im currently working on a summer project web application and I'll work on it solid for 3 days and then lose modivation for up to a week. But I get the same guilty feeling when I don't do anything for those days. I have not yet found a way to force modivation. I just go spend alot of time doing other things especially outside and it seems everytime I naturally regain modivated.

If I can, I take a break. When I can't, I look at this quote--I have hung up on my wall: "Try to do some BAD work, the worst you can think of, and see what happens, but mainly just relax and let everything go to hell. You are not responsible for the world. You are only responsible for your work. So DO IT." (Sol LeWitt in a letter to Eva Hesse) There's also a great video.

Or set up a reward system--one small candy for each task, or something similar.

Did you know that most of the best coders never formally learned code. They just picked up what info they needed to pick up as they went along to do what they wanted to do. You're looking at learning too formally, which is a huge mistake.

I was (very) recently introduced to something called the "Pomodoro Technique" that I guess helps fight burnout and helps you be more productive. You still probably need a couple days off to fix your already burnt up motivation.

Is there a project unrelated to programming that interests you? Maybe you can translate that into programming interest.