How do you structure your day? How do you motivate yourself?

Today, I've been putting a lot of thought into how I motivate myself and structure my day, when I don't have the motivation of impending deadlines, or the structure of regular courses. When it's just me by myself at home, with deadlines so far away, it's so hard to feel like doing anything. The more I avoid any sort of stress, the more I avoid everything.

I tried a lot of things, when I was writing my thesis. It helped that I had a lot of little deadlines. It also helped that I set up a daily routine, involving unplugging the network card (so I couldn't access the internet), shutting off the phone, and forcing myself to work all morning until early-afternoon. After that, I was allowed to do housework, talk on the phone, and not deal with homework anymore. Of course, I could only take that routine so far. I've always had a problem with being really productive while working during the day. I think it's a hang-over from all of those years of going to school during the day and doing homework at night. I'm so conditioned to do that, so that it's hard to make myself do the homework during the day. It's hard to just think of this as "work" and not "homework." I always found myself approaching an important deadline and having to get a lot of work done at night. It didn't help that I always got my best work done then.

These days, I don't work as well under pressure (too much anxiety over the past year has caused me to have a lot of trouble with handling stress). However, I also lack the ability to get good work done when I'm at home during the day. I get some decent work done when I work in my office at school, but it's hard to get myself motivated to get out of the house. Also, I share that office with all the other History PhD students, and so it's often being used when I need it. And I like being at home. I don't get so worn out when I'm at home.

Today, I needed to find the motivation to e-mail a prof. This doesn't seem big, but I was scared of this e-mail. It was going to be one part "I'm sorry that I didn't get back to you about meeting with you last Friday," and one part "There sure aren't many days left until you leave for a month, and so could you answer a couple of my questions to get me started in a direction?" It was an admission of the extent to which I've been avoiding everything. Yuck. And so I tried to motivate myself to get work done by first accomplishing a few household tasks that I'd been avoiding (laundry and dishes). However, accomplishing those took me a large part of the day, and it became apparent that I was avoiding academic things by accomplishing household tasks. And so I finally sat down and wrote the e-mail. But I felt awful the entire time. I desparately didn't want to write it, and I felt sick to my stomach, for some reason.

To all of you academic-types: how do you motivate yourself? How do you handle unstructured time? How do you get yourself out of avoidance cycles?