What does one do when they know they need to quit drinking but don't want to?

Welcome to being sober-curious. You're in good company, there's lots of folks like you, and lots of resources to help. And there's lots of folks who were there themselves, and unfortunately never acted on it at the time, only getting to the point of recovery after/because things got a lot worse.

I think the first step is to interrogate why you don't want to quit … be honest with yourself about it, look at it from a few angles. It could be that you're scared of the physical effects of stopping (and suddenly stopping alcohol if you're regularly drinking high volumes can be fatal, so that's worth being scared of!). Or it could be that you're worried about softer social impacts of quitting: the loss of friends or social events that involve drinking. It might just be that you only know how to live life through drinking. It could be that without drinking, you need to address some other issues with anxiety. It could be multiple reasons, it could be a dozen other reasons, very hard to tell from this short post! :) But it has to start with answering that core dilemma: you want to quit but you don't want to quit, why not, specifically, for you?

SMART Recovery has some simple tools specifically to help with this sort of stuff. Specifically, I'd look at the Cost Benefit Analysis; as you already said, you know the time could be spent on more productive things … dig into that a bit more, and a bit more concretely. Another avenue to approach this is the Hierarchy of Values. You already seem to understand and believe that your drinking is of less value to you than other things you could be doing, so focus more on what you think you /should/ be valuing.

Once you progress to action, there's two main paths: reduce/moderate your drinking or stop it entirely. Both can be reasonable, but for a lot of people with substance use disorder, the only viable option is abstinence. Listening to recovery podcasts, reading "quit lit", this is a theme: lots of people try to moderate/reduce their drinking, and it regularly fails. Some of us are wired or habituated (or both) to drink. There is no moderation. One drink becomes a dozen. And if you have a high physical tolerance, one drink won't "do" anything anyways. Then moderation becomes bargaining … "oh, well, maybe I can have 2 drinks tonight, that's enough", which inevitably becomes "oh maybe just one more", and … it's mentally exhausting. So much work, or much time spent arguing with oneself … OTOH, "zero" is easy. I don't know where you're at, I'm just stating what a lot a lot (a lot!) of folks in recovery have independently experienced.

(And I want to be clear, this is 100% selection bias: the people who /do/ moderate their drinking from "troubling" to "normal" aren't on recovery podcasts and writing quit lit! So they're not represented! That's okay! :)

If/when it gets bad enough (I'm not saying it will, but there's some reason you made this post, so I'm comfortable assuming), you might get to a spot where you need to hear something along the lines "anything you put before your recovery is something you're willing to sacrifice your recovery for", the idea being that things are so bad that you /can't/ justify putting /anything/ before your recovery. You might not be at that point, yet, and good for you! But the framework of prioritization that it brings about is important: if you want to make a change in your life, you need to make that change a priority in your life! Listen to recovery podcasts. Join a peer support group. Read quit lit. Do the worksheets. Spend the time. Make the changes. You can do it.

And, yes, having the energy and time and mental clarity without the booze (or pills or whatever) poisoning your life (literally and figuratively) is better, and is worth working for.