When it got to the writing-up stage of my PhD (social sciences) I tried to avoid procrastination by setting myself a target of 500 words a day. I figured that i

When it got to the writing-up stage of my PhD (social sciences) I tried to avoid procrastination by setting myself a target of 500 words a day. I figured that if a thesis was 100K words, knocking out 500 a day would get me there in less than a year. I put a few extra rules in place (they needed to be 'good' words, edited, revised and not just enough to hit the word target) but once I hit that target I felt like I had made progress towards the larger goal - even if just a little bit. Daily targets became sections, sections became chapters, and eventually I had my thesis. Had I not worked to this sort of structure I am sure that I would have put it off one more day, one more week...and never got there even if the research was done.