… I think you’ve realized now how difficult can be.
Because of that I would recommend striving at achievable goals. At first there’s the wonder of the language itself… the magic of kanji, new grammar and cool words not present in your own language. That for me kept the interest for the first months… Genki (well … textbooks) end up to be a huge energy sucking activity, so I stopped that and went ahead with this after the first 6 months.
Graded readers were the next activity that brought me new hope and made me felt like the gap from total newbie to actually knowing japanese was getting narrower. I would totally recommend that if your only reading practice has been textbooks so far.
While not really into AJATT, the immersion part (MP3 player and JP shows while doing shores) has been really great for getting used to listening 
… as an unconscious activity I can vow for the benefits.
While researching it’s very advisable, there’s the version where you wanted to study japanese but most of the day went by looking on “how to study japanese” ( I’m sure many of us have had that experience 
).
Native books, this was the next step to graded readers for me. But hey, I’m talking series aimed at 1st-3rd graders, so there’s that. I can easily go trough the kanjis thanks to what I learned in WK. Vocab wise the routine both in WK and Anki have paid. There’s still lots of new words, but not too many as to interfere with the actual reading.
As for grammar, after Genki 1, I opted for a sentence mining routine and use Grammar reference books to study unknown points. I’m using Genki 2 now to review and check that indeed I know all basic grammar that’s in there. But the whole textbook routine was something very unappealing to me.
Anyway, there’s lots you can do to make japanese learning fun again, particularly putting rewarding activities in every step of the learning process. The material that lead me to learning japanese is now very far from my actual abilities, but I’ve managed to find enjoyable material along the way, so there’s hope 