How to avoid procrastination during the research phase of my PhD? I just finished all of my coursework for my PhD program, and am entering the research phase of my degree with a topic already in mind.  I've already started the research, but I'm already finding that I end up procrastinating a lot of my time away.  When I was taking courses, I felt like i didn't have time to procrastinate because of the pace of the classes and I felt like I had to always keep up with the pace.  But now that I have no specific constraints, I feel like its harder to pace myself.  

Of course, I know it's a bad habit to procrastinate and I should probably devote most of my waking hours to my research.  Sometimes, (especially when I get stuck) I find it's so easy to get distracted on the computer (websites, youtube, text messages, etc.).  

What are some effective strategies to avoid procrastination during this research phase?  How do you stay on task, especially when you get stuck?
I have found (and continue to find) two kinds of strategies that have some success in preventing me from procrastinating.

Silly, but scarily effective:


As silly as this might sound, implement a blocker like Leechblock or Chrome Nanny and block sites that you waste time on. I used to scoff at such things, but once I installed them, I found myself being forced to spend more time working. 
Along the same lines, disable email alerts. Once I did this, I found that I could spend many hours working without getting distracted by random emails. 


Less silly, and also less effective

Much of the procrastination when starting research in grad school comes from the lack of clear structure (as you indicate). So the trick is to create structure. For example, if you're working on one problem, and you've spent a little time generating a few ideas, write them down, and methodically start working through each of them one by one, going as deep as you need to go in order to test out an idea. When you're doing so, try to forget about the larger problem, the context, your Ph.D, your future career, and all other "big picture" matters.  

More likely than not, the idea won't pan out (most don't!). In that case, move on to the next one. 

The problem with early-stage research is that it doesn't look like you're making any progress, so it's easy to slow down and waste time. But if you can measure progress not in terms of "papers published", but in terms of "ideas tried", you'll get some sense of the amount of effort you've put in, and that can help motivate you to try more ideas, and so on. All these failed ideas are teaching you valuable things about your project, and they will eventually be useful because of what you've learnt.