In my experience most people conflate tediousness with difficulty, and I think
that recognizing the difference is crucial to succeeding in any technical or involved
undertaking. 

A great but basic example of this is long division, quite a few people seem to think that
long division is some archaic and unintuitive sequence that magically gives you an answer,
as long as you remember all of the intricate steps. 

But long division isn't hard at all, it's actually all extremely easy and basic mental math.
On a single step only need to know your multiplication tables up to 10, and then just some
two or three digit subtraction, then repeat. The only "hard" part is keeping track of
where you are in the problem.

Breaking a supposedly difficult sequence into it's basic steps often reveals that it's
not necessarily the tasks themselves that are dificult, its the relationship between the
tasks that is hard to understand. This pops up over and over again in many areas I'm 
interested in, especially math and computer science, as well as music and art. 

Computers are almost the perfect distillation of this idea, at the basic level
they simply flip switches on and off; and even at higher levels the basic building
blocks are not complicated. It doesn't take much effort to understand how
an if-else construct works, or any other basic logical control scheme. But the sheer
amount of things that can happen from such simple set of rules is infinite.

I've found that acknowledging tediousness for what it is really helps put a problem
into perspective. Allowing myself to realize that the dificulty lies in something
else than the direct task at hand puts it into much greater focus. Looking at each
small step by itself dilutes the percevied difficulty, and making the overall goal
much more manageable.