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Nisan comments on Make your training useful - Less Wrong
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"You have to learn to be productive on demand rather than when you're in the mood for it."
Very true, and it's part of the reason I like to arrange structured activities that force me, on a day-to-day basis, to do the things I enjoy. I could have taught myself programming (maybe) but taking a course as my elective forced me to actually write the code when the assignment was due the next morning, as opposed to when I felt like it. It's a good feeling, getting something done and knowing you did a good job, but it's depressing how bad I am at motivating myself to push through and get it done without a deadline. (I don't know if this is true of other people, but actually I've been told I'm unusually productive.)
As far as I can tell, making good use of unstructured time is very rare.
It's possible that conventional schooling makes people worse at it.
The best way to make a good use of unstructured time that I've ever found is to optimize towards highest utility. In plain terms, you have an ultimate goal, a be-all-end-all reason to be doing something, and you're doing your best to achieve this goal as efficiently as possible because each time-unit of delay is negative utility.
This takes a goal, of course, which is pretty much comparable to Step 7 of 11 For Building a Goedel Machine, if you've seen Eliezer's Summit presentation that touched that subject.