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Building redundancies in personal organization and productivity systems: why it works for me

One of the most challenging topics of conversation I’ve had in the past few years is the eternal question of “why don’t you go all digital? Why keep paper planners, write in project whiteboards, and have an Everything Notebook?”. The answer is: I like the idea of having redundancies. For me, making sure that things appear twice or thrice in several different media and that I have back-up systems is important.

Having redundancies helps me ensure that nothing really escapes me. My To-Do lists are available in my Everything Notebook, my Google Calendar, my Weekly Project Whiteboard, and at my home office, in my Weekly Commitments Whiteboard.

Home office

In addition to printed calendars and Everything Notebooks, I have an additional redundancy in my home office: I have a Weekly Commitments Whiteboard right by my desk. I copy my most important To-Do’s (usually meetings and milestones) on to that whiteboard so the first thing I see when I wake up is exactly what I am supposed to be doing on that particular day. This redundancy ensures that even if I don’t have my Everything Notebook (or can’t access my Google Calendar), I know what to work on, every single morning.

As Eleonora Rohland aptly said here: “better redundancies than gaps“. I agree wholeheartedly, and this is why having redundancies in my writing and organization systems works for me.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 8, 2018

Note-taking techniques II: The Everything Notebook method

A couple of people have told me that they feel uncomfortable using index cards for their note-taking process. I completely understand, even though I love writing index cards and I use them to take notes too. Nevertheless, I also use other note-taking techniques. One of them is using just ONE notebook for absolutely EVERYTHING. That’s how I came up with the idea of my Everything Notebook – it literally stores everything.

Everything Notebook

How do I assemble an Everything Notebook?

I have created “Everything Notebook Starter Kits“, where I include the following items:

  • A 200-300 pages notebook, preferably with rigid covers. You can use whichever brand you prefer.
  • A set of rigid plastic tabs (1 inch long).
  • A set of highlighters.
  • A set of coloured fineliners/pens.

I often give these away as raffle prizes or simply to my colleagues, like I did for my fellow professor Dr. Elizabeth Perez-Chiques.

Each item has its purpose within the Everything Notebook process, as I describe below.

  • The long rigid plastic tabs create a physical separation between different sections of the Everything Notebook”
  • I write with different colours so I need a set of coloured pens. I use fineliners (0.4mm) instead of actual pens.
  • I highlight text in articles in at least 6 different shades (yellow, orange, pink, blue, green and purple) so I need at least that many highlighters.
  • I have used different brands of notebooks, but since I live in Mexico, I’ve settled for Norma’s Unicampus (as shown in the tweet above)

When do you write in the Everything Notebook and when do you use Index Cards? When do you use entirely digital methods (Synthetic Notes, Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump, memorandums, Evernote)?

This is a complicated question, which I luckily answered in a Twitter thread.

I do travel everywhere with my Everything Notebook, or at least, almost always, and I do always keep my Everything Notebooks from previous years, at my campus office or at home, but always handy.

Can I combine the Index Cards Method with the Everything Notebook Method?

Obviously yes. YOU DO YOU. You choose what works best for you.

Why do you keep your To-Do Lists with all your project and field notes in the same Everything Notebook? Don’t you get confused?

No, because as I mentioned, I need to carry just ONE notebook everywhere. I use my Everything Notebook as a daily planner, as a calendar keeper, and as a note-taking device.

Synchronizing To-Do lists

How do you use your Everything Notebook for note-taking?

Glad you asked. Here’s a Twitter thread of my processes and the instances when I use it and how I use it.

What happens when you finish one Everything Notebook and you need to move to another one?

I link them both. I also generate a table of content for the Everything Notebook I just finished.

I usually keep my last 5 years’ worth of Everything Notebooks at my office, because you never know if you’re going to need some random piece of data from fieldwork you did 2-3 years ago. Yes, of course, this all can be done digitally (OneNote, Evernote, ask Dr. Ellie Mackin about this.

What happens if you leave your Everything Notebook at home when you travel?

I write on loose leafs and staple them to my Everything Notebook upon my return. See below.

The idea and process of having just ONE notebook to write your notes and To-Do lists may not work for everyone. But I can assure you, A LOT of people have adopted my system and adapted it and it’s working for them. Obviously it works for me. I always try to bring it with me EVERYWHERE I GO for the reason shown below.

You may be interested in my other posts on taking notes, which you can access by clicking on this link.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 7, 2018

Note-taking techniques I: The index card method

Index cardsI’m an old school kind of guy, and I think everyone who follows me on Twitter and reads my blog (and knows me as a person) knows this. I like highlighting, scribbling (by hand, on paper). I write handwritten notes. I keep just one notebook, my Everything Notebook. I carry index cards, highlighters, fineliners, pens and my Everything Notebook everywhere I go. Therefore, I am sure that it will come as a surprise to absolutely nobody in the entire world that I still write bibliographic references, quotations and thoughts on index cards. Yes, small (3″x5″), medium (4″x6″), and large (5″x8″) cardboard, ruled index cards. In a previous blog post, I had shared how I take notes, but I am not 100% certain that undergraduate students would actually find my blog post very useful, since it’s been a very long while since I last took a class.

I graduated with my PhD years ago and I’ve been a professor for a pretty long time, so I thought that maybe I needed to settle down and clarify my ideas of the process I follow to take notes. In this series, I will share my processes to take notes using different methods. The very first method I use is the Index Cards Method. Other authors have referred to the process Niklas Luhman followed (Zettelkasten ). Hawk Sugano has shared his Pile of Index Cards (PoIC) method as well. Mine isn’t all that sophisticated, and since I combine my very analog Everything Notebook and notes in index cards with digital synthetic notes, memorandums, Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dumps, and Evernote, I don’t know that my system would be extraordinarily systematic. But here goes more or less how it works.

I produce at least 5 different types of index cards, which are more or less the same categories other folks have all agreed upon. Here are some resources on taking notes in index cards that I found useful as I was trying to make sense of my own system.

1. The Direct Quotations Index Card

I use index cards to write direct quotations (with page number and full bibliographic reference) from articles, books and book chapters I find useful. This card is the analog equivalent of my Synthetic Note method.

2. The Bibliographic Reference Index Card

It’s rare that I do this one anymore because I have been using Mendeley and EndNote as reference managers for more than 15 years, but this was my study method and strategy to conduct research before: I would write the full bibliographic reference in a 3″x5″ index card. Then I would write a small paragraph on the back summarizing the entire book, or at least, the main idea behind it.

3. The One Idea Index Card

I find that these are useful for when you’re studying for an exam, testing your ability to recall, or when you’re giving a talk without reading a set of Power Point slides (e.g. when you’re leading a seminar, using each card as a theme for the seminar). I also use them to remind me of key authors who discuss particular themes and topics.

As I said on Twitter, this is very rare for me to do, and I usually combine my own types.

4. The Summary Index Card

This type of index card is a summary of a particular journal article, or book chapter, more than of an entire book.

5. The Combined (or Content) Index Card

As its name indicates, the Content Index Card is a combination type of index card that includes direct quotations, draft notes and ideas, conceptual diagrams, etc. that are all associated with the main article, book chapter or book discussed in the index card. I use larger (5″ x 8″) index cards for those cases.

There are obvious questions that people ask me, so I’ll try to answer them here.

1. Can you do digital index cards?

For sure. You can either do combinations as I do (physical index cards, then row entry in a Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump row), or all digital (either in Evernote or simply in Excel, or synthetic notes or memorandums in Word or Scrivener as you may choose).

2. How do you store and classify index cards?

I usually have boxes that fit my index cards, and add a plastic tab with the reference in Author (Date) format. Other people use different classification systems (by keyword, by topic, by author). I just recommend that the process be consistent across.

3. When should I use memorandums and synthetic notes and Excel Dumps, when should I write in my Everything Notebook, when should I craft index cards?

This question has such a personal preference type of answer.

4. What size of index card should I use?

This is again, a personal preference as I note in my tweet below.

I do teach my students the Index Card Method of Note-Taking because I believe it is important to learn the old-school techniques, but also because I find that it helps me, and I strongly believe that if it helps ME, then it may also help THEM. In subsequent blog posts I’ll share some of my note-taking techniques when using my Everything Notebook, and other types of media.

You may be interested in my other posts on taking notes, which you can access by clicking on this link.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – November 28, 2018

What is a PhD? What does doing a PhD entail?

I have three PhD students right in their second year, plus I informally mentor other 3. I love mentoring and supervising students, particularly doctoral ones, because this component of being a professor is really the one that allows you to build how other scholars think and you can see them flourish. All doctoral students I mentor are parents, a fact that also brings along specific challenges, as I try to be a supportive supervisor. Two of my current PhD students are undertaking Doctor of Philosophy degrees, and one of them is undertaking a Doctor of Business Administration, which is a slightly different kind of degree. At any rate, because they are all in their second year, they all have come to me with very important questions about where their dissertations should go, how to build their research questions and how to come up with their contribution to the literature and the “gap in scholarship” they are filling. But these contributions need to be VERY CLEARLY STATED in the dissertation, and at the doctoral defense.

As I said on Twitter (you can read the rest of my Twitter thread by clicking anywhere on the tweet shown) there are core elements to the doctor of philosophy degree that have been agreed upon collectively. For me (and for a lot of other doctoral advisors) a PhD dissertation is an original contribution to knowledge (which can be theoretical, empirical or both) which fills a void (or a gap) in the literature on a particular topic. While moving across disciplines could possibly mean that said gap may not actually exist (and therefore, a dissertation could very well be creating a new area of scholarship and understanding), for the most part, particularly in disciplinary settings, a PhD dissertation fills a gap. Something wasn’t known, well understood or read about Phenomenon X in this particularly novel way, and therefore this dissertation fills a gap in the literature. I really like how Tierney Wisniewski put it:

I also agree with Susan Porter and Lisa Young: “The core of the PhD continues to be the development of the ability to do independent, rigorous research, as documented in the dissertation.”

Finding a gap in the literature signals originality. PhDs are supposed to make an original contribution. That’s the crux of the degree. Academic, social impact, interestingness, all are added bonuses. Of course I would like my doctoral students to do interesting, scholarly robust and impactful research. And obviously I want my students to undertake topics that are interesting TO THEM (I don’t care if the topic isn’t interesting to me, it’s not MY PhD dissertation!) But the core of the dissertation research is, whether people like it or not, or agree or disagree with it, an original contribution to collective knowledge, which is signaled by showcasing a gap in the literature that the dissertation fills.

SO HOW DO YOU FIND A GAP IN THE LITERATURE AND HOW DO YOU ENSURE THAT YOUR DOCTORAL DISSERTATION IS NOVEL?

My recommendation to my students always is to READ AND MASTER THE LITERATURE VERY WELL. Read broadly, read deeply, engage with the literature. Also, don’t expect that your doctoral dissertation will have all these grand innovations. We all contribute to scientific and human knowledge incrementally.

Failure to do this kind of clear articulation is not the student’s fault. Students are developing their knowledge of the literature, and more importantly, they’re still in the process of learning how to conduct independent research. In my view, this failure to clearly articulate a doctoral dissertation contributions is a supervisory issue.

So, how do I prefer that my own students write their doctoral dissertations? I like them to be able to very clearly articulate the following:

I am grateful for people’s articulations of these thoughts as well, because I think we all collectively develop how we deal with doctoral research in different ways.

Ultimately, my goal is to guide my PhD students to complete their dissertations on time, doing important, interesting and innovative research in a way that is both fulfilling and scholarly rigorous. All these blog posts are inspired by the numerous failures in supervision that I’ve witnessed through the year. I don’t want my own students to go through the hell that I’ve seen others go through. A PhD (and any scholarly degree) should not be painful. It should be challenging but not torture. And on this very topic, PLEASE read Katie Wedemeyer-Strombel‘s excellent post in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

If you liked this blog post, you may also be interested in my Resources for Graduate Students page, and on my reading notes of books I’ve read on how to do a doctoral degree.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – November 22, 2018

Developing a structured daily routine for writing and research

One of the main questions that my doctoral students have asked me most frequently is “how do you structure your daily work routine, professor?“. While I am a scholar of neoinstitutional theory and I know the importance of routines, I have to confess that I don’t think about my own daily work routine often enough to share a clear outline of how I work on a daily basis. BUT I also love Dr. Eva Lantsoght’s series “How I Work“, in which she interviews schoars who describe their daily routines.

Monthly calendar revision

Planning and schedulingI do love structure, perhaps a little bit more than I should. I am very regimented with my daily routine (wake up, write/read/analyse data/exercise/shower/run to campus) but at times, I wonder if having very rigid daily schedules has been counterproductive. I will admit that for the most part, no. I like structure, routine and discipline and a regimented life. When I was a teenager, having this kind of “militarized” daily routine was super helpful to me: I had a lot on my plate and juggling all my tasks required smart planning and thinking very systematically about what my long term priorities were. At the time, I was doing competitive dancing, high-performance volleyball and volunteering for adult literacy campaigns, so I had to wake up at 5 am to head to the gym and train for 2 hours, then go to school, then train volleyball for 2 more hours.

Once I was done with volleyball training, I still had to do 2 hours of dance training, then focus on my homework. After finishing my assignments, I still had to do volunteering, so these commitments required me to be very, very strict about not wasting my time. I feel lucky I retained this kind of thinking and regimented discipline throughout my undergraduate and my Masters and PhD. Being disciplined and systematic about my daily routines has helped me sustain a regular research and writing practice, particularly because I get distracted rather easily.

I superimposed a regimented structure onto my PhD, because that’s basically the only way I know how to work. I am not someone who can just “fly by the seat of his pants”. I need to know what I am doing when, and I don’t foresee that this approach will change through time. But I know quite well that having unstructured time is challenging, not only for faculty but also for students. This is a common concern I see on Twitter, from doctoral students:

I am particularly reminded of this very important tweet by Stephanie McKellog on the challenges that unstructured time can present (particularly in the summer time, for doctoral students, but also for faculty and post-doctoral researchers, etc.):

So when my doctoral student asked me what my daily routine looked like, I figured I had to write a blog post to share my thinking on this issue. I plan for the year, then break down my commitments per month (using printed monthly calendars, and by hand), I insert my standing commitments in my Google Calendar, and on my Bi-Weekly Project Whiteboard, and then I write my Weekly Plan and daily To-Do List’s (5 items, 4 items, 3 items through Granular Planning and the Rule of Three, or 2 – through the #2ThingsADay strategy – items, depending on what I can actually accomplish that day). The core of my planning system, obviously, is my Everything Notebook.

My daily writing and research routine when I’m on campus looks more or less like this:

At the end of every day, I try to leave my desk cleared and my work papers organized so that when I come back the next day, my working spaces and areas are perfectly organized. That way I can work without worrying about organizing my desk or where a specific paper went. I don’t waste time in the mornings organizing stuff because I put order into my things the previous day/evening/night.

I know many people loathe the idea of as much structure as I give my life, but I have found that if I don’t do this, I am lost. Hopefully my process will help my students and anybody else who reads this blog post!

One thing that I think is important to add is that if you have care duties (children, parents, etc.) I believe that you should schedule everything around those commitments, not all the other way around. For example, one of my doctoral students has to pick up her kid at 2pm. I told her to work from home in the morning, pick her child up, have lunch with him and THEN come to campus. This routine works better for her. As someone who is childless and single, I am keenly aware of how parenting and more generally, care work can become a hurdle for doctoral students and academics/post-doctoral researchers. So, I try to make my planning processes as family-care-friendly as possible. I champion a more human, kind and humane academia and therefore my strategies, mentoring approaches and routines reflect this belief.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – November 17, 2018

The Sunday night weekly planning strategy

As most of those who read my blog and follow me on Twitter know, I’m very systematic about what I do and how I plan. My annual programme (which I create using printed monthly calendars and my Everything Notebook has the major milestones, but as time goes by, and things get post-poned, plans get derailed, or additional obligations get added, I need to make adjustments. Some are major, a few are minor.

Planning and Scheduling for the Fall

I have two major moments of strategic workload readjustment. The first one is at the beginning of the month, where I look at my yearly plan as I broke it down per month, and then check commitments, verifying whether I missed something important by some odd reason. Since we are almost in November, this is the right week for me to revise my Monthly Plan and reassess what my commitments are and which ones I need to fulfil and what obligations I need to say no to. I check my Monthly Calendar every week, but sometimes I need to make changes even in that one, because I get invited to give keynote talks, participate in workshops, attend student progress meetings, etc. So, by the end of the previous month, while hopeful that nothing in my calendar will change, I am also aware that things may get added on to my schedule or shifted around.

The second moment of To-Do’s review for me is either on Monday morning or Sunday night. Throughout October (a perfect month for experimenting as it started on a Monday) I have experimented switching it over between revising my plan for the week on Mondays (as soon as I get to the office, or as soon as I wake up at home and start working) and then on Sundays. I’ve found that planning my week on the Sunday night allows me to hit the ground running on Monday. I probably have carried this strategy from my doctoral student days, when (if I needed to work over the weekend) I used to work Sundays instead of Saturdays (a strategy I recommend to my own students).

I have to admit that Sunday night has worked much better for me than Monday morning. For one, it doesn’t intrude on my early morning writing/reading process. For two, it allows me to quickly glance at my daily plan and know exactly what I’m doing and what time. Hopefully this strategy will work for others too.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – October 29, 2018

Writing topic sentences and crafting paragraphs

Two of the questions I get asked most often not only by my own students but by other scholars on Twitter as well are: “how do I write good topic sentences?” and “how do I write good paragraphs?“. These two techniques are important for many reasons, but the one I think about the most is the topic sentence, because I believe good topic sentences often can lead to robust, well-written paragraphs.

My #AcWri process integrating reading CSED

This is one reason why I am (like Dr. Eve Ewing in a tweet I quote below), a fan of the 5 paragraph essay (a type of essay that is often taught at the college/university level). In my view, well-crafted topic sentences set the stage for coherent and robust paragraphs which then produce sound, cogent, articulate essays. While sometimes unpopular, the Intro, Body, Evidence, Discussion, Conclusions model (the 5 paragraphs essay) is replicated in scholarly writing beyond undergraduate writing (see the IMRAD model of scholarly paper). I thus concur with Dr. Eve Ewing here in that the 5 paragraph essay IS actually a smart way of introducing undergraduates to scholarly writing.

Unfortunately, some of the journal articles, book chapters and books I read skip the basic structure of a paragraph as described by Dr. Patrick Dunleavy in his blog post on constructing paragraphs. This is problematic because if the topic sentence is not the first one that you find in a paragraph, it is harder to discern which one is the most important and therefore, readers may find it challenging to evaluate the content to determine the most important and valuable idea within.

The usual structure of a paragraph is (and I borrow from the Dunleavy model here, though I apply my own codes):

  • Topic Sentence
  • Body
  • Tokens (Supporting Evidence(
  • Wrap (Closing)

My office at CIDE Region Centro during and after writing a paper

Professor Dunleavy doesn’t agree that the Wrap sentence (what I call the Closing Sentence) should link to the next paragraph. But frankly, I do like doing this, and my writing reflects this. I believe that the Closing Sentence should allow me to follow the flow (the Throughline or Red Thread) of the entire paper.

How do I know whether a Topic Sentence is well constructed? This is a question I often get asked. One test I usually ask my students to apply is to highlight in yellow (see my colour-coded highlighting and scribbling scheme here) the first sentence of every paragraph of an entire paper or book chapter. If they are able to understand what the paper or book chapter is about through only the topic sentences, then the author chose the right ones. This method for quick reading (skimming) only works if authors follow the model where you start a new paragraph with the topic sentence.

Academic writing (working from home)

I concur with Dr. Jessica Calarco (Indiana University – Bloomington) here where she says that a robust essay should have solid topic sentences and well-written paragraphs.

When I write, I try to follow the topic sentence model. For me, a key idea should be contained in one paragraph. As I searched for sources that I could link to in order to help readers discern what a good topic sentence is, I came across D’Angelo (1986)’s article, “The Topic Sentence, Revisited“.

If you read this article, D’Angelo goes back to the intellectual history of what a topic sentence and a paragraph look like. What D’Angelo and the authors he cites indicate is that a paragraph is a set of sentences that are coherent, cohesive and provide an entire idea in a self-contained unit. Therefore, a topic sentence establishes the TOPIC (or the theme, the main idea) of a paragraph.

The topic sentence must, therefore, ensure that if we read it (and only that particular sentence) we can have a broad, bird’s eye view of the full paragraph, even if we add supporting material and a closing sentence afterwards. A paper with good topic sentences should therefore easily be skimmed by reading only the first sentence of each paragraph. Although as I mentioned above, there are a number of academic writers who do not follow this model, unfortunately, because they feel it is formulaic. Nevertheless, I strongly believe in following strategies and formulas and THEN use slight variations and deviate from the model.

That’s why I recommend writing papers through one of two methods: (1) Answering Questions and (2) Listing Topic Sentences. These topic sentences then, as Dr. Calarco mentions in her tweet above, become full sentences. I also encourage my students and readers of this blog to consider paragraphs as their target objective. Producing enough words to finish a few sentences and form a cogent, cohesive and coherent paragraph should be a valid goal for academic writers. This belief is also why I encourage my students to write in paragraphs, one idea at a time.

Once you’ve crafted your entire paper/essay, you can then run a Reverse Outlines (Paragraph Replanning) analysis like the one posited by Dr. Rachael Caeley here. By drafting an outline and seeing how it looks like, you can see if you need to replan specific paragraphs.

A few resources:

Hopefully this blog post will help people formulate better topic sentences and develop stronger, more coherent and cogent paragraphs.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – October 25, 2018

Planning the timeline and progress of your doctoral dissertation (or Masters/undergraduate thesis)

One of my PhD students lamented this week with me that she had a lot to juggle (taking children to and from schools and to and from activities, etc.) and that she needed a strategy to make her research move forward. I had been planning to write this blog post for a while, since this is the one question I get asked the most by doctoral students (“how do I plan my unstructured time over the summer” being the other one).

I had to rush to get this blog post done because my student is 2 years away from the deadline her university has imposed for her thesis defence, which is why I sat down with her last night to show her how I do things. I have two other PhD students at exactly the same stage (2 years to defense) so I figured I might as well finish this blog post.

While I’ve suggested that people read one (or more) of the books that I’ve digested myself (check my Writing a Doctoral Dissertation page), one of the main things I teach my students is how to apply backcasting techniques to develop a project plan. I was trained as a project manager, and I worked in that capacity for a number of years, so I understand exactly the kind of work that needs to be done to develop good project plans.

There are a few resources for students, which I mentioned on Twitter earlier today (October 5th, 2018), many of which are listed in the thread that will appear if you click anywhere on the tweet shown below. Thanks to everyone who responded to my query, though I think many of them were professors describing their own process, which is not the same as having a doctoral dissertation (ONE GOAL) to finish in X number of years. My students are doing theirs in the 3 papers’ model, which is a bit closer to the day-to-day life of a professor, but still, the trajectory is quite different. Anyhow, here are some recommendations (click on the tweet to expand the entire thread).

The core planning strategy I would thus recommend doctoral, masters and undergraduate students is to engage in a combination of Gantt Chart Design and project backcasting techniques.

The Gantt chart is a technique I learned in graduate school when I took project management courses. This is a hypothetical Gantt chart for my doctoral student, covering about 15 months.

Gantt

For Gantt Chart templates, you can see Dr. Emma Sheppard’s here.

Here is another resource that you can use to create Gantt Charts.

Hugh Kearns and Maria Gardiner have lots of resources on their site, and have published books on this as well.

Dr. Patrick Dunleavy’s book “Authoring a PhD” is incredible and really does help students who are planning their PhD process. I recommend it to my own doctoral students.

And of course I would be remiss if I forgot to recommend Dr. Ellie Mackin Roberts (my coauthor for a forthcoming book on research planning) and her website. Ellie has A TON of downloadable printables for you to plan your own research. She is fantastic.

In the end, the process I recommended to my students and that I do myself is – set a target defense date and then work backwards and plan tasks, activities, and intermediate goals. For example, I have asked my students to plan submission dates for their 3 papers (to be sent to journals) and then schedule fieldwork and data analysis accordingly. This process has worked well, and I hope my description of the process will help my students and others!

In a subsequent blog post I’ll describe how to go from long-term goals (submit paper X by Y date) to daily tasks. That blog post will definitely apply to doctoral students and post-PhD folks.

If you liked this blog post, you may also be interested in my Resources for Graduate Students page, and on my reading notes of books I’ve read on how to do a doctoral degree.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – October 6, 2018

Lateral Writing: A strategy to fight “writer’s block”

Lately, I’ve been experimenting with a technique to help me get words out, particularly as I have 2 revise-and-resubmit papers, 3 book chapters that are due, and I’m writing 3 books, two of them with firm deadlines. I noticed that when I am really stressed, no matter how hard I try, and how many of my own strategies to “get my writing unstuck” or “prompts to get me writing” I use, I end up still blocked. The last technique I’ve been experimenting with is what I call “Lateral Writing“.

Radisson Paraiso (Perisur, CDMX)

Lateral Writing refers to that text-generation that is not focused The Main Thing You Need To Get Out ASAP, but that will help you move your research forward. For example, I have an R&R that is due towards the end of the first week of October. Ideally, I’d be able to write JUST THAT ONE PAPER. I’d already have the response to reviewers, letter to the editor, new version of the paper, etc. all ready to go.

Well, I’m getting there and I have drafts of all of these but I’m not totally finished. BUT I’ve managed to write more than 4,000 words of another paper that is also due toward the end of October, and about 5,000 words of one of my books (the one with the closest deadline), and bits and pieces of other R&Rs. This is why I often try to work with a MEPFED model (Move Every Paper Forward Every Day).

Library Cubicles at El Colegio de Mexico

Doing Lateral Writing (for example, writing on bottled water or on human right to water while I have to finish a paper on waste pickers) has enabled me to still move forward both with The Revise-And-Resubmit Revised Paper That Needs To Be Submitted At The End of the First Week of October, but also with other stuff that I also must finish, including my tenure process documents. Hopefully the notion of Lateral Writing will be useful to my readers too!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – October 1, 2018

The October 2018 #AICCSED Reading Challenge (read one article a day)

Reading outlining and calendar cross-postingOne of the biggest issues we seem to have as academics (be it practitioners, students, faculty, post-docs, contingent faculty) is carving the time to read. I’ve written before about the importance of reading systematically (every day, if possible), and about the legitimacy of reading as a key component of academic writing. Well, here’s my challenge to you: during the month of October 2018, we are going to read ONE article per day. If you use my Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump (CSED) technique, you’re also supposed to write one entry (row) on the article you read. Again, let’s use Monday-Friday (though you’re welcome to read all 30 days!). I think it is really important to read during October, because November 2018 is coming up fast, and as you may remember, November is also #AcWriMo (Academic Writing Month), when everybody writes as much as they can to get (if possible) a book written.

Reading and AcWri and highlighting related content

Doing an AICCSED Reading Challenge in October would enable an author to then launch into #AcWriMo full speed. Hopefully many people will join in! I did an AICCSED Reading Challenge in mid-April, and it was wildly successful.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – October 1, 2018