The struggle is real... my most productive deep work has always happened while standing next to my advisor in his office, staring at his chalkboard and working through research problems together. Can’t do that over Zoom...

Same actually. I haven't had those type of conversations, and moments of inspiration/motivation in a year now, with everything.

Be structured and have clear goals.

After we went to remote work, my students have been making weekly presentations to me, which serves to update me on their work and helps them become better communicators of their research.

They recap what I suggested, they give a status update on what I asked them to do and whatever else they did, they compare the results of their experiments to past experiments (baselines), and they propose next steps and I make suggestions with regard to what I think makes sense.

In my field, machine learning, we often stitch multiple papers together, so each project is aimed at being a paper in the dissertation. For my lab, we come up with the idealized main contributions for a paper, and then work toward those goals. We may not meet them, but it provides structure and their informal presentations to me facilitate organized discussion and analysis of results.