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Reverse-planning (backcasting) a paper (or a research project)

Funny how some ideas have grounding on different disciplines and yet, we all end up learning more or less the same concept across several of them. I first heard of the concept of future studies (aka futurology) and its idea of backcasting during my Masters’ programme. In particular, the strategic planning literature uses the idea of backcasting first posited in future studies and then adapted to strategic management to introduce how we think about pathways and trajectories towards reaching a goal. I remember I used to love the journal Long Range Planning and would spend entire afternoons reading full volumes of journal issues at the Koerner Library at UBC, and at the Manchester Business School library. I also took project management courses during my Masters, and I’m an engineer, so I think about projects in a project-management kind of framework.

BackCasting with @mmilan

Photo credit: David Armano, Creative-Commons-licensed on Flickr.

In sustainability studies, the concept of backcasting refers to the idea of imagining a sustainable future, and then devising the strategies, pathways and trajectories that would take our society to that point. That’s backwards planning, reverse planning, reverse engineering, etc. You decide on an end point and then you trace the necessary steps back. Reverse-planning a paper and/or a research project works EXACTLY the same way. While I normally would use the word backcasting for designing trajectories towards sustainability, I also often use it to refer to the deconstruction of the process of creating a project and positing all the different pathways and trajectories this can take (this is where mind-mapping techniques also work wonderfully).

Essentially, I reverse-plan a paper or a research project (specifically the outputs) by taking the end date of the project submission (for example, a conference paper submission deadline) and backtracking the steps to achieve what I need to do. I will use an example of a paper I am coauthoring with Dr. Amanda Murdie (University of Georgia) for the International Studies Association conference in February of 2017. Both Amanda and I are really big on organization, so it is REALLY easy to coauthor with someone with the same kind of planning skills.

The paper needs to be submitted at least one week before the deadline (February 23 is our panel), so Amanda and I plan to write the entire paper in the next few weeks. Therefore we are planning to meet a few times in between, and to do some work on our own to contribute to the paper. We have scheduled a couple of meetings in January and at least one in February to discuss the paper submission and the Power Point presentation. The paper draft needs to be perfect by February 16th, which means we need to have a solid draft by February 9th so we can do final editing, formatting, etc. and start thinking about the Power Point presentation right about then.

Reverse planning

Now, if you see my calendar for the first semester of the year, you’ll see that I am at a conference February 9 and 10, and that I will be at Indiana University in Bloomington on February 7th and 8th for a short research visit. This means that I basically won’t be able to do any work that week. Therefore, the entire paper draft needs to be ready by February 5th at the latest. That gives Amanda and myself a full month to write the entire thing, do the analysis and so on.

I do this backcasting process for every project I have in the works, again, based on the conference papers I have committed to writing and when the submission deadlines are. If you read my yearly planning process post, you can see that I have at least other four conference papers to write, for sure (2 MPSA, 1 for the institutional analysis workshop, 1 for WPSA, and then I might present again two of the previous ones, with improvements, or write others, I haven’t yet figured that one out).

It is important for me to include here both my work and my coauthors’ work, so I share my calendars, projects, goals and objectives with them so we all know when things are supposed to happen by when and so that we are all on the same page. This is quite important if you’re doing a lot of collaborative work (which I have been doing in 2015, 2016 and now 2017). My coauthors are simply amazing, and they also love doing a lot of this kind of rigorous planning, so it IS easy for me to do the kind of research I conduct with them.

Reverse planning

Another example of backcasting for a research project can be found below, for my recently funded grant for water conflicts in Mexico. There are four components (one ethnographic, one of social network analysis, one with agent-based modeling, and one with text-as-data techniques). I am the principal investigator, but there are other three researchers working with me, and two postdoctoral researchers, plus two research assistants and one Masters student and one PhD student. It’s a two-year project, so I backcasted from when we had to write the final report and worked out backwards when we had to do every component. Obviously, the fieldwork needs to happen this year. So that’s how I designed the project to work.

Backcasting Water Conflicts Project

While I do a lot of work on paper, I often simply run to the software tools I normally use. I’ve used Microsoft Visio to design my project plans, I recently explored MindManager to create mind maps and do project plans, and I’ve also used simple Microsoft Power Point to draw the actual project timeline. What I have learned is that when you do collaborative work, and even if you do work solely on your own, storyboarding your project (as Dr. Patrick Dunleavy from London School of Economics and Political Science suggests) can actually be VERY useful.

Storyboarding the vlog!

Photo credit: Why Tuesday, Creative-commons-licensed on Flickr.

The trick to combining backcasting with storyboarding is putting the timeline at the top or bottom of the storyline. That is, if you’re going to do project backcasting, you can move around the project goals, activities and so on around the timeline (using Post-It adhesive notes, for example), but the timeline stays static. That way you can effectively plan where activities must take place and by when (specific deadlines). Those of us who actively storytelling would probably also enjoy storyboarding for project and paper planning.

Also, for those people who ask me who else does this kind of project and writing planning well, I find Dr. Ellie Mackin’s research planning website quite helpful. Ellie has a number of excellent templates for project planning, planning writing, etc. You may want to peruse it here. And hopefully my approach to backcasting a project may be of use to you! In my previous blog post on my yearly plan I also linked to several templates to reverse-plan a paper. You may want to check those.

Hopefully my process makes sense for everyone! It does for me.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 31, 2016

My yearly planning process through the Everything Notebook

People have asked me if I could share my yearly planning process and how it relates to the use of the Everything Notebook. I have also been asked if I use other planners and whether they’ve worked for me. I’ll answer both questions in this post. There are many planning and organizational methods out there, and there are several brands for yearly/monthly planners that many people (particularly fellow academics) have been testing out. I’ve been working with the idea of an Everything Notebook for way too long to test a new planner, particularly because I have my own method. So that’s what I will share here: how I do my yearly planning, using an Everything Notebook.

The first thing I do is print out a year-long calendar, and a set of 12 monthly calendars. Since I do everything analog and old-school, I need to have the physical printouts and coloured pens so that I can cross-post to my Everything Notebook. I then use all the conferences and workshops I have planned to attend or at least I’m interested in doing as a heuristic to know when I’m going to do something. Teaching (which I normally do in the fall semesters, 2 courses at a time) helps me with anchoring the fall semester, and I use the time slots for my classes as organizing heuristics to plan the rest of the year. For many people, it will look as though I’ve only planned seven months out of the twelve when they look through the yearly calendar. This is precisely because I use conferences and workshops as the anchoring point for what I am doing in a particular year. If I know that I have a certain number of seminars, workshops, talks and conferences to attend and present at, I can use the certainty of those dates to put firm dates on specific deadlines.

So, for example, the last conference I am committed to participating in is the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC 2017) in Utrecht, the Netherlands, in late July of 2017. I know for a fact that the American Political Science Association (APSA) will take place in August, but since I don’t know if I am accepted or not, I left a blank space in my calendar just in case it will need to be added.

As you can see, I have 6 papers committed for the conferences I have planned, but I have more way conferences than papers (either committed to, or at least, interested in presenting at). This is because I actually don’t know what I will be submitting for an abstract for each conference at the moment. Given that I have funding for conferences for this year, I’ll most likely submit an abstract on a public policy issue for ICPP and one for water conflict for IASC 2017.

The others are relatively easy to think through given that I might be doing similar papers as in previous conferences, or I may do extensions of a specific one. For example, for CPSA and CALACS, I might most likely do something on bottled water. And for PMRC I might do something on teaching public administration. The one I can’t miss at all is the one I am coauthoring with Dr. Amanda Murdie and presenting with her at the International Studies Association ISA 2017 in Baltimore.

To be able to plan the entire year, I printed out a yearly calendar for 2017 using TimeAndDate.com‘s templates and then asked to show Mexican holidays. If you’re in Canada, obviously, you may want to show the Canadian holidays.

Once I’ve used the conference scheduling as backbone for the entire year, I start planning my writing output for the following year. I have four categories:

  1. Revise and resubmit in 2017. These are the papers that I need to revise during the year and resend. Probably rejected pieces, or R&Rs where I submitted them in 2016 but will need to resubmit in 2017, once the changes are made.
  2. Submitted and under review, for potential R&R in 2017. These are the manuscripts that are under review but that I am waiting to hear from. I won’t work on them until I hear back
  3. To be submitted. These are manuscripts that are THIS CLOSE to be finished, but that I have not submitted yet because I haven’t been able to finish the tiny little changes that make them a final submission (like, reformatting for a specific journal, etc.) These manuscripts are the reason I created the hashtag #GetYourManuscriptOut. Dormant papers that all they need is a swift kick and off they go!
  4. To be written and/or completed. These are papers I’ve been thinking about writing or commitments I have with specific granting agencies (for example, for my National Problems CONACYT Collaborative Grant, I committed to write 3 papers on each case study where I conducted ethnographic research. So, I plan to write at least one of them in 2017. Also, drafts of papers I already started writing that need to be finished. For example, I’m writing right now on the social construction of water scarcity in Mexico. That paper has been in draft for a while (also, the reason #GetYourManuscriptOut exists), so I plan to finish that paper this year.

I am super analog with this process, so I print out monthly calendars and insert my daily commitments (you can pre-fill your Google Calendar with your commitments and THEN print them out, or do the reverse). I usually just schedule the major commitments there, as I know that (as Dr. Adam Wellstead has said, sometimes my weeks change, so I need to maintain a big-picture kind of approach here).

I fill out my commitments for all conferences in each monthly calendar, including when I am supposed to fly in and fly out. One important thing in the planning process for me is that I include my commitments ONLINE and OFFLINE, both simultaneously. That is, I schedule a month at a time, both on my Google Calendar and on my printed calendar. They need to be synchronized for my systems to work. I can’t just plot all my conferences and then forget about them. So instead of plotting everything on my printed monthly calendars and then copying all the events on Google Calendar, I insert all events on GCal until I finish doing the scheduling for the entire year. One month on paper, one month digitally.

Google Calendar week commitments January

I go month by month scheduling my commitments for conferences, workshops (AND personal stuff). I dump all my plans for papers into my Publications Planner. Then I back-track and reverse plan until I know when I need to collect data, when I need to do fieldwork, when I need to clean up a dataset, by when do I need to do all the writing, for EACH PROJECT I do. There’s a very broad range of reverse planning processes, methods and templates. I enjoy several of the following:

  • Dr. Matt Lebo’s excellent paper on how to manage your research pipeline shows you how to plan a paper and back-track until you know when you need to do what by when.
  • This template offers guidelines and sequential steps for how to do backward planning (reverse planning).
  • This template shows a very brief and simple but useful example of how to do reverse planning for exams. The same technique applies to when you write a paper.

    • I need to make sure that the synchronization of my monthly activity plan with my Google Calendar is complete, otherwise I can double-book myself (which has happened before).

    Now, a lot of people ask me how do I plan by week and by day. I haven’t written a “How I do my Weekly Planning” post, but my original Everything Notebook post describes how I move from monthly planning to To-Do Lists per week. I also have an instructional video (forthcoming) on how I do the assemblage of the Everything Notebook.

    So far, I’ve scheduled my tasks per month (commitments in terms of conference papers, meetings, etc.) From each monthly planner, I prepare weekly To-Do Lists. For example, for the first week of January I have 5 meetings (two with students, and three with my research assistants, my project participants, and my project manager). I can transfer those tasks on to my Weekly To-Do list, and insert a tab marking that specific week in my Everything Notebook, as shown below.

    If you collaborate within a laboratory, or with other colleagues, Amy Wooldridge’s suggestion is brilliant.

    As I’ve said before, my methods are there to be adapted and if they help you with your own productivity, I’ll be a happy camper, since they help ME with my own workflow!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 28, 2016

Simplifying your document processing: The Four Trays Method

Filing traysI originally wrote this blog post as an email response to a request by Dr. Brian Leech from Augustana College on how I do my document processing and filing. This problem happens to all of us: we have a number of things that need processing (committee materials, student files, printouts, etc.) Often times, we are so overwhelmed by other things that we end up saying “oh, I’ll file these materials soon” and end up needing to have accessed them before. I use a method (the Four Trays Method) that I shared with Brian and that I am happy to share with all my readers. Here is how it works.I book at least 30 minutes to 1 hour on Friday after lunch (which is when my brain is completely useless) to file. I have a set of five filing trays, four of which I occupy regularly with the following labels:

– For a paper I’m working on (data, newspaper clippings, printouts, etc.)
– Should be memo’d (aka I should write a memo on this article)
– For someone else (my admin assistant usually sends these to the person I label this for)
– To file (these are items related to my students, letters I send, committee work, etc.)

I have a fifth tray, as can be found in the photo, with the title “Processing” – this is usually something I am actually working on at the time, and it’s usually the last tray, because since I am already processing that document, I should be able to put it in any of the other four (which is why the technique is called the Four Trays Method). This method needs to be adapted if you don’t have administrative and/or research assistantship support (both of which I am lucky to have).

My research process (when writing grants)

My admin assistant usually looks every day at my “To File” tray. If I have labeled something with the name of certain file, she files it in that folder. Or she opens a new folder for a file. Or she contacts whoever I said needs to be contacted. If you don’t have admin support, the “To File” tray is the first one you may want to process on the Fridays, because that’s usually the one that grows faster (creating file folders, labeling them and locating them in your filing cabinet actually does take a lot of time, believe it or not). But let’s assume you DO have admin support, for the sake of it.

The second tray that always gets processed by someone other than me is the “For someone else“. In this case, either my research assistant or my administrative assistant send these to whomever I marked the items for. For example, if I’ve found a paper in a print journal that I think a colleague of mine at CIDE would benefit from reading, or I have a new book that they might want to scan, I put it in that tray.

On Fridays, after I’ve processed everything that needs to be put in the “To File” tray, the next stack (or tray) I deal with is the one labeled “For a paper I’m working on“. I label the item with the action I need to undertake (‘clean up this dataset‘ , or ‘ask my RA to download articles related to this one‘ or ‘write a rhetorical precis for this paper‘). I dispose of it by writing in my Everything Notebook what I should be doing with that piece of work (my RAs have similar filing trays, though they are usually “IN” and “OUT” only) – the IN items for my assistants are things they need to do for me by a certain date, the OUT is usually stuff they need to deal with (either give me or email me).

The last stack I deal with is the “Should be memo’d“. I book time in the morning to write a memo for those articles, books and book chapters usually on Tuesdays (Mondays I am usually more creative in my #AcWri so I usually blurt out words, but Tuesdays I need something to “prompt” me). I usually memo 3-5 articles in 2 hours, but that’s because I read really fast. You don’t need to force yourself to memo an entire article in a writing session, but I find that processing them fast (by writing a memo and getting quotations or dumping the rhetorical precis in my Excel dump) it helps me become more motivated, thus I process more documents (untli I get fatigued).

The trick is – if you have admin support, make sure they know what to do with the item (or make sure you create your own shorthand and codes). I use disposable Post It notes (really tiny) with abbreviations. For example, a letter of reference I wrote for a student usually has something to this end: “FILE -> STUDENT’S NAME”. My assistants (and I) know my abbreviation codes. For example, if I am working on an R&R and I already received a response, I usually write on the Post-It “FILE-> PAPER’S NAME”. If I need to memo a paper, I usually write “MEMO BY A DEFINED DATE” on the Post It Note.

I know my process may be weird for some people, but it really does help me. The two items I find are most useful is: booking time every week to do the filing/processing, and using the trays to help you plan your next week (which is why I process documents on Fridays, to have a To-Do list for Monday morning ready). Hopefully it will be helpful for other people!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 26, 2016

Rules, norms and institutional erosion: Of non-compliance, enforcement and lack of rule of law

I have been living in Mexico for the better part of four years, after 20 years living in Canada. Trust me, it wasn’t an easy decision to move back. Canadians have a VERY strong sense of rule of law. I had never lived in a country where rules were so strictly followed. Drivers stop at the stop sign and follow traditional driving rules. Regular folks don’t throw their discarded items on the street, but instead of littering, they find a garbage can (available on a regular and frequent basis all over the cities). I lived in a country where compliance with regulations was the norm and expectation, and I now live in a country with such low rule of law and lack of enforcement capabilities, and a culture where lack of compliance with regulations is THE NORM, that there is very little expectation of legal enforcement of laws. As a result, living in Mexico has become for me a daily struggle.

I am a neoinstitutional theorist. I was educated in Canada, with the belief that there were rules and norms to comply with and where non-compliance would result in severe punishments. For me, not obeying rules is not in my DNA. I study rules, institutions and norms for a living, for crying out loud. So I experience a daily struggle, one that I am thinking my colleagues in the United States of America will start facing soon enough, given the recent election of DJT. This thread by Dr. Paul Musgrave clearly outlines the challenges that the US faces and how DJT is getting away with lies, taunting, protocol violations, to name just a few of the ridiculous things that the President-Elect of the US of A is doing since his election on November 8, 2016.

In responding to Paul’s thread, I offered some context for why I left behind the entire field of environmental regulation. If you’ve read anything by me in the last 5 years, you’ll be hard pressed to find something where I explicitly talk about environmental regulation (I have published on the topic, a couple of book chapters and my entire doctoral dissertation). For my PhD, I started studying environmental regulation in North America, with a primary focus on Mexico. I was interested in non-regulatory environmental policy instruments (you can read this paper of mine with Dr. Peter Nemetz in 2001 on the broad range of environmental policy instruments, and a conference paper with Dr. Kathryn Harrison and Dr. Mark Winfield in 2003 on the politics of information-dissemination policy instruments to get a sense of what I was interested in).

I wrote my doctoral dissertation on an integrated assessment of the restructuring of two cities’ industrial districts under multiple stressor pressures, which included environmental regulation, changes in land use, zoning regulations, technological change and shifts in consumer preferences. I still studied environmental regulation, but it was just ONE of many factors that I was studying. Regulation stopped being my main focus of research simply because I became very frustrated with studying rules and norms in an unruly country. I still study norms and rules, but I am more interested in those that are informal and that emerge from self-organization rather than those imposed by a central body, like local, provincial and federal governments.

What I am seeing right now in the US (a steady and slow erosion of democratic norms and a systematic violation of rules by the President Elect, in particular as though “they don’t apply to him“) is something that I’ve seen in other countries where I have studied formal and informal rules and institution building (and decay). This, in my view, is worrisome. If the US is going to want to continue having a functioning democracy where compliance with rules and norms is an expectation at the societal level, it’s going to have to do something major to stop this systematic rule violation.

My view is that we need to start doing some serious work on compliance with formal rules (I keep coming back to the Antonia Chandler Hayes and Abram Hayes work on compliance with international agreements), and find ways to create informal rules and norms where what the PEOTUS is doing is NOT considered normal (building on the work of the late Elinor Ostrom).

The problem is, as I said in my tweets, that we don’t really know much about how to deal with this systematic breach of rules and norms, particularly in a country where there is a higher expectation on a certain degree of compliance with regulations and formal rules. Democratic institutions are predicated as stabilizing precisely because we count on this compliance.

These are big questions, and ones that will probably make me come back to my old field of study: regulation theory.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 23, 2016

Mind mapping as a strategic research and writing tool

My first degree is in chemical engineering, but I started taking courses in what my colleagues used to call “the soft sciences” (aka strategic management, business administration, and social sciences) towards the end of my undergraduate. I figured that if I wanted to ever get out of being a process engineer, I would need some “soft skills” and managerial techniques. Plus, growing up I always loved managing my parents’ offices (my Dad is a lawyer, and so is my Mom, pre-PhD in political science). Besides, I thought I could learn some employable skills.

One of the techniques I learned when I first took a course in management (the course was aptly named “Managerial Techniques”) was mind mapping. Mind mapping is a visualization and concept-design-and-display technique that helps you display interrelated concepts in a visually appealing way that makes sense seen as a whole. There are AMAZING graphic/visual recorders out there, like my good friend Nancy White. Below is one of her concept maps.

Social Media Skeptics Conversation Mind Map

Photo credit: Nancy White on Flickr

In my own research and writing, I use mind maps. I started fiddling around with MindJet’s MindManager a few weeks back, but the price took me completely aback ($400 USD for the full version, which is about $300 USD more expensive than what I can afford, particularly because I get paid in devalued Mexican pesos and we’re at $20 Mexican pesos per US dollar right now). Since I was finishing what turned out to be a really heavy and overwhelming semester, I was basically unable to fully explore MindJet’s MindManager for Windows 2017 (though I have to admit it is SUPER NICE and I wish I had $400 USD to pay for it).

But what I could do with it really amazed me, in particular the integration of analysis capabilities and pre-designed mind maps, such as the Ansoff Matrix for Strategic Risk Analysis or Porter’s Five Forces Model or even the Fishbone Diagram (the Ishikawa Cause-Effect Model Diagram). I have to admit that I’m quite grateful to the Sauder School of Business where I learned all these strategic analysis and planning tools during my Masters’ program.

Analysis tools mindjet

What did I like about MindJet’s MindManager for Windows 2017? Except for the price, just about everything. MindManager is amazing and has a really extensive library of tools, and pre-designed mind maps.

types of mind maps

Below you will find a section of my mind map for the water conflicts in Mexico project for which I just won a large, two year grant. You’ll see that I wrote in the team, the project goals, the outputs we were supposed to produce, etc. Using mind maps, and specifically MindManager’s capabilities really made it easy to design and present.

Portion of my project mind map

An additional element I liked about MindManager was that it provided tips along the way to design the mind map.

Tips from MindJet

You could use MindManager to map how to write a paper (and you could potentially use it to mind map your paper using my 8 sequential steps to writing an academic paper post and the software)

Writing mindmap

With so many templates, you could basically construct and manage a large research or writing project using MindManager (which also, surprisingly, integrates with Micro$oft Word!). Below you can see how a timeline mindmap can also integrate with budgeting capabilities.

Project Timeline

Overall, I love mind mapping as a tool to draft conceptual relationships and create project maps, but as you can see from the MindManager screen captures I show here, you can do A LOT MORE with mindmapping than what you might think. It is really up to the user to explore the depth of techniques and tools you can integrate with mind mapping and concept mapping.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 22, 2016

8 strategies that may help keep up with reading during the semester

One of the hardest things I have struggled with has been the ability to keep up with the sheer amount of reading I need to do, given the broad variety of topics I study. But I do consistently make time to read, particularly because I integrate reading into my academic writing, otherwise I would need to read in bulk. I do have a couple of strategies to keep up with my reading while on a teaching semester. As I’ve said before, it’s important to be strategic with your readings. You don’t need to Read Absolutely and Entirely All The Things (not in depth, that’s what I mean, unless you’re writing your comprehensive exams for your doctorate, and even then!). But the trick I think to staying on top of reading is being systematic about it, and having a process. Here is mine.

1. I craft a syllabus with things I want to learn. This forces me to read and stay on top of the most recent scholarship. Plus, it enables me to revise my syllabi and do an intersectionality test and check whether I have included works by women, minorities, scholars of color, etc. In a previous blog post, I called this process the “answer seeking method“. In previous years, I designed my syllabi to answer questions. Once I knew what I wanted to teach, I then revised them to tell a good story. Given that I had been away for a while from teaching public policy courses per se (e.g. public policy analysis, design, implementation, evaluation), I needed to craft syllabi that would push me to learn new stuff, and check the latest literature on a particular policy field.

2. I book time for reading, every day. And I don’t let anyone interrupt that time. As you may remember, I am a very vocal and ardent advocate of establishing healthy boundaries and protecting my time.

This will be my door sign for the next 6 weeks ☺️

Though I’m past my 3 year reappointment, the fact that I’m untenured means I need to be very strategic with what I do and how I use my time. Thus, I have made a commitment with myself to book time for reading, Every Single Day. This may sound counter-productive if you want to actually write (aka produce generative text), but I always have to allocate at least 30 minutes to an hour per day for reading. Otherwise I feel like I fall behind on the literature, which I really can’t afford. Obviously, there are a lot of things we need to read, but putting time into keeping up with the scholarship is one of those things I can’t just let slip away.

3. I organize my reading per day, per topic (i.e. per paper I’m writing) and per my collaborators. That way, what I am supposed to know is fresh in my mind and ready for conversations. For example, this semester my coauthor and good friend Dr. Oriol Mirosa teaches on Tuesdays and Thursdays, whereas I teach Mondays and Wednesdays. This means that it’s usually Fridays when we have the time to engage in research meetings (thank you FaceTime!). To make sure I’ve got enough time to read (either stuff my coauthors send me or stuff I want to share with them), I usually organize my reading per day and per paper. So, you’ll probably see me reading stuff on the human right to water on Thursdays, so it’s fresh in my mind for my meetings with Oriol which usually take place on the Fridays. With my coauthor and also good friend Dr. Kate Parizeau, with whom I am coauthoring a couple of papers on the governance of informal waste picking, her heavy teaching day was usually Wednesday, so we met on Tuesdays or Thursdays. That meant that I needed to be ready, so I booked time to read well in advance.

4. I ensure that every printed piece receives some kind of treatment (processing). I’ve written before about how important it is to process every single piece of work, without falling into what Professor Pat Thomson calls the “PDF alibi” (which means, downloading PDFs of articles “to read later”). I have managed to always systematically process every single piece of paper, or document, or electronic file. Some people call this the “Touch It Once” rule (e.g. once a piece of paper, email or file lands on your Inbox tray, you should process it but only ONCE).

The problem we have in academia is that we often need come back and can’t follow the “Touch It Once” rule. For me, touching a PDF or piece of paper ONCE means, reading it right there and then. Even if it is a quick skim (which is rare for me because I read really fast), I already have looked at the main ideas in the paper, and know if I need to do a rhetorical precis, if I will write a detailed memorandum, or if I need to come back and read it armed with coloured highlighters and pens. So my “some kind of processing” rule is “at the very least, skim the damn document“. Obviously, this approach risks that you may end up with a huge pile of “Papers I Should Be Memo-ing”. It’s happened to me before and I’m not immune to this. When this happens, I go back to Item 2 (Book Time To Read and Avoid Interruptions At All Cost).

Reading academic papers while flying

5. I break down the amount of reading per piece of work (e.g. one chapter, one article). For example, there are entire books I want to read. But if I can’t read the book in one sitting, I make sure to schedule a couple of chapters for a 30 minutes reading session, or 4 articles for a 1 hour session. If I can’t scribble and highlight on all four, I write a rhetorical precis, with an instruction to myself to “memo” the paper (e.g. write a full-blown memorandum).

When I schedule time to read, it's my favourite time of the day.

6. I read when I travel, or during “idle times”. This includes commuting by bus, inter-urban bus, or airplanes. Most of the reading I do is during what people call “idle time”. Not leisure time, but idle time. For example, I sometimes decide not to drive from Aguascalientes to the city where my parents live. As a result, I take the bus. Thus, I bring along reading material for me. Reading on an inter-urban bus, or on the metro (subway) or on a plane doesn’t make me dizzy, so this only works if this is the case for you too.

Like any good academic, reading on the plane :)

7. I take breaks from reading (I take regular breaks overall). Sometimes, I think we feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of reading we need to do, and thus we experience what we could call “Readers’ Block” (a la Writers’ Block). When this happens to me (usually when I am doing a literature review and I am feeling overwhelmed already by the sheer amount of reading I have to do), I take a break. I check my Twitter, Facebook, go for a walk, meet up with friends. I leave the reading pile behind and take it from where I left once I am feeling less tired and overwhelmed.

Reading and writing on the plane8. I switch it up and vary the type of reading on a daily basis. Until I had graduate students of my own, I hadn’t realized how much time we (professors) need to spend reading and providing detailed feedback. This was very common when I was doing my PhD and when I taught undergraduates (I still teach undergrads), but became more painfully perceptible when I started helping students supervised by other professors. I am a pretty involved committee member, and I recently realized that I was spending a lot of time reading the stuff that other supervisors were letting go unchecked. Nevertheless, since it’s my job to help the student, I read their stuff at whichever stage it is. And so when I am feeling overwhelmed with the type or amount of work I am reading, I switch it up.

If I am not feeling up to reading an entire PhD dissertation in one sitting, I read a few pages per day. Same with book manuscripts I’m often sent for peer-review.

So, hopefully these eight strategies will be useful to you all when you have a heavy-teaching semester.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 22, 2016

In defense of libraries

I am a bookworm. I have always been. When I was a child, I catalogued my parents’ thousands of volumes using the Dewey decimal system. I know how to calculate a Cutter number. I know the Library of Congress system. And now that I’m old enough to be a professor, I am the representative of my campus to CIDE’s central library committee. I may not buy myself a Christmas present, but I’ll spend an entire month’s salary in books. I love reading, and I love the physicality of books.

New books at CIDE Region Centro

This morning I tweeted a photograph that has taken a life of its own, where the main point is: we need to teach our students (and everyone, indeed) to learn how to use physical books, and more importantly, information literacy. In our current times, where thousands of people get their news from the internet (Twitter, Facebook, blogs), it’s more important than ever to learn how to use printed sources, and how to discern the validity of their content. But that requires a commitment to reading, not only skimming content. That also requires solid, well-stocked libraries.

I have always worried about the state of public libraries. To me, having a solid public library is a clear example of a city where there is strong interest in literacy. I loved reading this ode to the public library by Maria Popova. The city where my parents live has, in my view, very few public libraries.

My hometown, Vancouver, has one of the most amazing public libraries I have ever been to, in my life.

Library Square Vancouver

The Vancouver Public Library, photo credit Monique Sherrett

I used to live near two of their branches, Mount Pleasant and Riley Park (which sadly is now permanently closed). Local public libraries are fundamental not only to democracy and good government, but also to a strong social fabric. I love buying books and have a hard time giving them away, but if I am going to get rid of books, it’s only to give them to other libraries. For example, this summer I gave away hundreds of my books to libraries in my former university and the city where my parents live.

A really fun campaign (of which my good friends Kate Trgovac and Rosemary Rowe are part of) is the notion of the Little Free Library. They opened one at their home in East Vancouver in 2013. I also found out that University of Calgary Press donated lots of books to a number of Little Free Libraries in Calgary.

I wish we had an initiative like this in Mexico. I’d be happy to be part of one, myself. Furthermore, as someone who does urban ethnography, I know very well that what Angela Clarke wrote here in 2013 still holds true: for many vulnerable people, libraries are safe havens. I hope we can protect them and push for more of them in the future. I don’t care how digital our world becomes, the printed word and libraries are, to me, sacred. And can you believe some people actually are AGAINST Little Free Libraries?

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 16, 2016

Flint, Mexico and the dangerous, slippery slope from tap water to bottled water

I have been following the tragedy of Flint (Michigan, USA) water residents’ struggles with their municipal tap water supply ever since it started. It’s perhaps the only instance of water problems that I know of in recent years that has been taken as relevant and seriously as climate change. As my own research has shown, environmental activism manages to shine light on complex issues more robustly and visibly whenever human health issues are concerned, and in this case, the Flint water crisis has prolonged for over 2.5 years.

Bottled water in Madrid

I recently read (in the news) that even as water quality levels improve, Flint residents still choose bottled water over tap water. As I mentioned on Twitter, this is the textbook model of how bottled water companies sustain their leadership in public water provision. Like the Mexican case, one I have been researching for a few years now, fear of the tap and distrust in the municipal water utility to supply high quality water are two major factors why people shift from drinking water from the tap to purchasing bottled water.

In a 2009 paper in the journal Society and Natural Resources, Dr. Yael Parag and Dr. Timmons Roberts discussed this fear of the tap, a phenomenon that I myself have observed replicated in the Mexican case. I have conducted extensive fieldwork in many municipalities across the country, one of my students wrote her Masters’ thesis on the stories around bottled water in Mexico, and another of my students did his Masters’ thesis on a non-parametric, snowball sampling survey of reasons why Mexican consumers drink bottled water. All of our data and conclusions point to the same reason: Mexican people don’t trust their municipal water utilities to provide them with safe drinking water.

Bottled water on campus

And as my research has shown (and Dr. Andrew Szasz’ inverse quarantine theory also confirms), when it comes to their own health and the food and drinks they consume, individuals are extraordinarily risk averse. This risk aversion (combined with local water utilities’ weakening and poor infrastructure in some cases) is something that bottling water companies exploit to convince the consumer of the safety of their own product.

Until we have strong municipalities with financially and technically robust water utilities, with the capacity to supply safe water, bottled water companies will continue to win the battle and commodify the human right to water. This is a dangerous scenario, because Mexico went from drinking basically no packaged water to becoming the world’s global per-capita consumer of bottled water in less than 30 years. Is this really the pathway that other countries want to take?

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 16, 2016

New publication: The Environment (book chapter in International Relations)

chapterLast year, I was invited by Robert Oprisko to participate in a collective effort book led by him and Stephen McGlinchey that would map the field of international relations from a perspective of “Day One” (that is, someone who has never taken a course in international relations). Given my expertise in global environmental politics, Robert and Stephen asked me to write the environmental chapter. I’m very proud to join my friend Dr. David Hornsby (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg) and many other excellent scholars. The final version is much shorter than the version I wrote originally (which had tables and figures and included reference to two important datasets.

The first is a dataset on global constitutional environmental rights produced by Dr. Josh Gellers at University of North Florida and the second is a dataset on global environmental summits generated by Dr. Kate O’Neill from University of California Berkeley).

But still I think it’s a very fun read and I’m proud to contribute to teaching the next generation of international relations scholars. The book is Open Access and is entirely downloadable here, and my chapter starts on page 165. Enjoy!

Raul Pacheco-Vega (2017) “The Environment” In: Stephen McGlinchey (Ed.) “International Relations“. E-International Relations Publishing, Bristol, England. pp. 165-173

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 10, 2016

Processing a Paper Protocol – from PDF to memo

Clean office with new couchWhen people visit my campus office, they often admire the fact that I have a systematically organized library where my books and printed articles/book chapters/reports are all available (and ordered alphabetically, in the case of printouts, and by topic, in the case of books). For me, “processing” articles and books/book chapters is a systematic process that enables me to know where to find which piece of research. Thus “processing” entails finding the digital version, saving it, reading it, and then organizing it. I do this to avoid what Pat Thomson calls “PDF alibi”, that is, thinking that I have already processed an article or a book chapter when I simply downloaded it and stored it and I did not read it. Since I integrate reading with my academic writing, I am rarely victim of PDF alibi syndrome. But I have often said, I’m definitely not above doing long stretches of reading, particularly when I am preparing a literature review for a paper.

For me, processing a paper (or a piece of work) entails the following stages: First, I give it a very quick read. Then, I decide if this piece requires deeper engagement with it, be it through highlighting and scribbling on the margins, be it by writing a rhetorical precis, or be it by preparing a detailed memorandum.

Often times, the bunch of printed output that I need to process comes from a detailed citation tracing search. I am currently writing a literature review on the human right to water, so I had to catch up on everything that has been published since I last did one (e.g. in the last four months).

The process is as I’ve shown above: I download the PDF using Last Name, Year and Title of the document. I organize each file in a folder (I do have a folder for PDFs “To Be Organized”). I also print it out and sort it as indicated above (and in this post). I also upload the PDF on to my Mendeley database and clean up the reference.

I'm not convinced about reading on Mendeley.

When the paper is relevant but I don’t think I have the time to prepare a detailed memorandum, I simply write a rhetorical precis that I can then type and digitize and add into my Evernote library. This makes my database of rhetorical precis searchable and findable. I also save the file into my Dropbox in the folder for the paper I am currently writing.

When I have a good number of articles that are worth memo-ing, I dump the memorandum (or at least, the most relevant quotations) into my Excel conceptual synthesis worksheet. Even if I only write a rhetorical precis, I always keep it also in the literature review Excel worksheet, so that I know which articles to refer back to.

Often times, I’ll scribble notes in my Everything Notebook that are related to a specific piece of printed work. When that happens, I use the last name of the author and the year to prepare a plastic tab and use that tab to separate my scribbles on the Everything Notebook (and to ensure that I can find my notes easily!)

Again, the point of this post is: NEVER FILE A PAPER UNTIL YOU’VE READ IT.

In my case, I never file something until I’ve processed it. Hopefully my method is useful to you!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 5, 2016