I write better with deadlines (...sometimes, though my track record with challenges is less than stellar >.>) and last year I started giving myself a deadline, write 5K words of fiction (fanfic, original, whatever) a week. It works pretty well - sometimes it means I'm writing Nano-style, padding my word count, but it means I'm always producing *something*, which is much better than having nothing (and if I write more than 5K words I put it in a "bonus pool" and plan to reward myself when the pool reaches something reasonably big, so I'm encouraged to keep writing even after I hit my wordcount...)