How to respond to reviewer comments: The Drafts Review Matrix

As I have been sharing my academic workflow with my blog readers, I realized that much of what I have been writing may be of help not only to PhD and Masters’ students, or early career scholars (postdoctoral fellows and assistant professors) but also to my own undergraduate students. I have decided that I will be creating a series of webinars to showcase many of the techniques I use, and I will also be writing an integrative blog post that goes all the way from having a research question and deciding what to search for in Google Scholar to integrating the literature review to drafting the research paper.

Linking my Draft Revisions Matrix (TM) to my paper draft sidebar comments. Notice I write response by hand ☺️ pic.twitter.com/mW25kzMKwl

— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) June 21, 2016

In the mean time, and given that I’m also doing revisions to a book chapter as I’m travelling in Copenhagen and Aarhus (in Denmark) for the Public Management Research Conference 2016, I decided that I would write a post on how to respond to reviewer comments. This chapter I’m revising is in Spanish, so you will have to forgive that the tables and commentary are in the Spanish language. I couldn’t find one of my revisions’ tables for my papers in English (my Dropbox crashed a few months ago so I moved a lot of files to other media), but these should do.

Basically, I follow a similar model to that espoused by Tanya Golash-Boza (University of California, Merced) and Theresa MacPhail (Stevens Institute of Technology). I also got the idea from the emails I have received through time asking me to respond to specific queries from the university press or the specific journal where I submitted my paper. The table below is an example from my 2015 article published in the Review of Policy Research on transnational environmental activism in North America.

I adapted this table and the models proposed by Tanya and Theresa so that I could make it work for my own workflow. For me, it is important to give myself the intellectual and physical space to make the changes and respond to criticisms and comments. Thus, the last column is empty until I fill it up with notes. I usually write the specific response to feedback by hand, and link it to the physical section of the paper (I often do this either with a highlighter or a Post-It adhesive note).

Here is how I revise my manuscripts, be it responding to comments and criticisms from readers or reviewers, or my own commentary after giving it a first read. I create a matrix of responses (what I call the Drafts Review Matrix) using the comments from my reviewers and writing my responses in the box with “Response/Action”. Please note that I also include text from the paragraphs where the specific comment was provided so that I can quickly find where exactly is the comment from the reviewer that needs to be addressed.

My Drafts Review Matrix has four columns:

Comment location: Where the reviewer inserted a comment asking for a clarification or a response. I usually make sure that my first column clarifies exactly where the coment is exactly located e.g. “first paragraph, line 3, page 44.”
Original text: I always make sure to include text that the reviewer highlighted when inserting their commentary or feedback, so that I can look it up and quickly understand what they meant with their comment.
Observations: This is the exact wording of the reviewer’s comments. It usually also appears on the margins of the Word document, so I physically connect the content of the cell with the comment on the margins with highlighter of the same color.
Actions: These are the actions I took to address the reviewers’ comments. Often times, I include the exact wording of what I am going to insert as text into the section that was highlighted. Note that I cross it off with red ink once I have addressed it, both in the physical copy of the paper, and on the Draft Revisions Matrix cell corresponding to the actions that were required. I also delete the comment box from the Word document once I’ve addressed the issues.

As you can see, I actually physically write the actions I take, or the text I am going to insert in the post, and then use a marker to cross the text across within the Actions cell so that I know I have addressed that specific commentary. If I were a bit more organized, I probably would include a column with the Date or Deadline for Actions (e.g. when will I deal with a specific comment), but to be perfectly honest, I prefer to finish editing the manuscript ONCE AND FOR ALL. So, if you do enjoy using your #AcWri writing time (which I do in the mornings) to edit then you may want to just specify the dates (and budget time for when you will work on, and by which date you will finish each specific editing task)

The beauty of integrating the Literature Review Excel Dump with the Drafts Review Matrix is that you can use the Excel dump cells’ content to write the specific changes you will make for a specific section. I also often write them in Post-It notes and stick them to the physical page with the number of revision or reviewer comment that I need to address. I almost always revise a manuscript in one sitting, but you do not need to do so if you prefer to do parts of the editing as single, discrete, achievable units of work (as I have often recommended before)

EDIT: I have updated (February 3rd, 2018) my Drafts Review Matrix. You can find the new format in this blog post.

Posted in academia, writing.

Tagged with academic writing, AcWri, editing, workflow, writing.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – June 23, 2016

Overcoming structural barriers to reducing bottled water consumption

When people ask me about my research on the politics of bottled water, often times they will ask about ways in which they can change their individual behavior in order to reduce packaged water consumption. As I travel quite often for research and conferences, I have been realizing that there are several structural barriers to reducing bottled water consumption. That is, no matter how much we “activate” social norms and encourage individuals to shift consumption from water in a bottle to water from the tap, there are structural barriers that posit a challenge for anyone to change their own behavior. I will note two barriers in this post, specifically.

The first one I noticed is the lack of infrastructure for refillable water bottles. This absence of refilling stations is also often coupled with a total failure in providing water fountains. I have noticed this at airports everywhere, but Mexico specifically. This is quite problematic given that Mexico is the top-ranked country in the world for per-capita consumption of bottled water. It is also one of the countries where bottled water companies are raking huge profits. Ironically, this problem (lacking water fountains and refilling stations) is not only present in airports, but also at schools (where we can often see young kids rush to purchase soft drinks) and local parks. My own research has confirmed what other authors have said: much of the rise in bottled water consumption can be traced to a lack of trust in tap water. This problem is also compounded by recent municipal water utility breakdowns, like the case of Flint, in Michigan. My good friend, coauthor and water governance specialist Oriol Mirosa (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) makes an excellent case for why this is happening.

Bottled water as a public policy problem is not only a case of governments needing to respond to the increased commodification of the human right to water, but also a case of designing policy interventions that can lead to an actual real improvement in the face of acute water scarcity situations. The second structural barrier I have encountered in my experience doing fieldwork is compounded by the first one: regulatory frameworks that prevent the travel and reuse of water bottles. This is very specific to airports, where you can’t get a bottle of water through security (and therefore you need to either empty it or dispose of it). This is compounded by the fact that, if you have a refillable bottle you would need to empty it before going through security at the airport. If there is no infrastructure to refill your bottle, you’re basically out of luck and you MUST purchase a bottle of water.

Lately, I have dealt with this second structural barrier by bringing my refillable water bottle (empty) through security and then going to a coffee shop and/or restaurant and asking if they can refill it with tap or filtered water. It’s unlikely that they will say no. But this is just an example of how we need to go beyond offering incentives to reduce individual bottled water consumption and, instead, creating structural conditions to increase tap water consumption.

THAT is where one of the main policy challenges remains.

Posted in academia, bottled water, governance, water policy.

Tagged with bottled water, incentives, structural barriers.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – June 21, 2016

Synthesizing different bodies of work in your literature review: The Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump (CSED) technique

Since I’m writing a series of posts on literature reviews (and undertaking a few of my own), I figured I could expand on how you can combine citation tracing, concept saturation, results’ mind-mapping with a method that Professor Elaine Campbell showcases in her excellent post “How I use Excel to manage my literature review“.

I call this technique the “Conceptual Synthesis Excel dump” – I call it “dump” because I basically throw into the Excel file everything that is already in my research and conceptual/reflective memoranda. Doing the conceptual synthesis Excel dump as you do your reading allows you to create a nice map of the literature. It also helps reach conceptual saturation during the literature review.

What I am showing here is my Excel dump on bottled water. There are a number of themes (if you’re doing coding in qualitative methods, you’ll understand what I mean) that interest me:

Fear of the tap water.
Decisions on whether to consume tap water vs. bottled water.
Branding water and bottled water and the use of branding techniques in promoting bottled water.
Ethical bottled water.

I am showing three screen captures of the Excel file I created. Note that the columns I use are the following:

Concept – here I list the main idea or major theme of the specific literature review.
Citation – here I include the full citation (article, book, book chapter).
Main idea – here I summarize the full article in a sentence or two.
Notes 1 – here I make notes about specific ideas or whether I agree or disagree
Notes 2 – same as the above
Notes 3 – same as the above
Cross-reference – which references and citations are linked to one another.
Quote/quotation – specific quotes, as per my memorandum technique, that could be useful
Page – the page from where I drew the quote. Note that I can draw several quotes from same article

My Conceptual Synthesis’ Excel dump technique is quite handy in the process of creating a literature review (both to reach concept saturation and to create the mind map). Hopefully it will be helpful to you too! I wrote this post partly as a response to the tweet below 🙂

Love this – kind of like @raulpacheco's memo-ing, only in spreadsheet form 🙂 https://t.co/yT9pjaVChx

— Rebecca Linnett (@rebeccalinnett) June 15, 2016

IMPORTANT EDIT – After many requests, I finally got around creating a Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump template that you can download and edit for your own purposes. I use a framing theory paper but you can adapt to your needs.

Posted in academia, research.

Tagged with literature review, research, writing.

6 comments

By Raul Pacheco-Vega – June 17, 2016

Designing and implementing a Publications Planner

Several scholars have written about how they plan their own publications, and I was a bit wary of writing a piece that would address how I plan my own publications stream and trajectory. Professor Erin Marie Furtak wrote on the Chronicle of Higher Education about how she has 11 types of pieces (categories) that she includes in her publications’ planner. The website Jobs.Ac.Uk also published a nice Research Publications Planner (free PDF) that can be also very useful. Finally, I also strongly recommend Professor Matthew Lebo‘s “Managing Your Research Pipeline” piece in PS: Political Science.

In my case, my Publications Planner is quite simple, and I divide it in two different sections: Conference-to-Journal Article, and Direct Paper. The conference-to-journal-article section basically outlines which journal I’m submitting the paper to, and what I am supposed to do to finish it.

The direct paper section focuses on manuscripts I’ve decided to write and submit without going through a conference submission.

One thing I do is update my Publications Planner through time (every week/two weeks) so that I know exactly where I am with each manuscript. But I recognize that maybe this method may not be optimal. The one thing I really ought to do is go through the list of manuscripts (these two tables are just a draft), and make sure EVERY SINGLE MANUSCRIPT I have in the works is included in these tables.

Posted in academia.

Tagged with AcWri, papers, publication, publication planner.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – June 16, 2016

How to do a literature review: Citation tracing, concept saturation and results’ mind-mapping

There is a number of academics (and coaches and consultants) who have both a strong presence online and do a marvellous job of writing excellent blog posts as guidance for undergraduate, graduate students and early career professors. Two of my favourite who write specifically about literature reviews are How To Do a Literature Review (written by Aurelie) and Literature Review HeadQuarters (written by Ben – see this helpful post of his on when to say “I already have enough literature, thankyouverymuch“). I would refer you to their websites so that you can learn a lot more about how to do literature reviews. Recently, I was asked to write about how I do literature reviews. I could simply point you to Ben and Aurelie’s blogs, but I figured I could contribute something to the list of posts on academic workflow techniques.

In my case, there are a number of things I could share about how to write a literature review, but I want to focus on 3 major themes that I think are important to the way in which I write my own literature reviews: citation tracing, concept saturation and mind-mapping of results. These three concepts are interrelated and quite relevant for anybody writing a literature review.

First, to find whether you have read everything you need, you must engage in citation tracing: you will need to find the key references across the literature for your particular project. Then, you need to map whether your literature review has reached concept saturation: have you exhausted the field for the specific topic you are working on? And finally, you will need to lay out how different citations, bodies of work and key concepts relate to each other. I normally do this using the technique named mind-mapping.

Citation Tracing:

Citation tracing refers to the activity wherein we trace which authors cite which work, and the relationships across these cites. For me, citation tracing is fundamental, because it allows me to see whether there is a gap in the literature, and how each author is working through the concepts. For example, I have seen about 4 articles on the human right to water and how to implement it from a policy perspective. None of these articles actually link to the literature on policy implementation. They talk abstractly about policy implementation of the human right to water, but they fail to link to the literature. How did I know this? Because not only did I read the article, but also looked through the reference list. I did not recognize any articles that were specific to the policy implementation literature (a body of works that I know very well given that I teach the omnibus course on public policy theories).

There are different ways to do citation tracing. Aurelie offers a good overview using Google Scholar. Generally speaking, I combine two methods: the first one is a Google Scholar backtracking search. I search on Google Scholar for the keywords I aim to do, and restrict the search to the last two or three years. This allows me to find a few (generally 4-5) relevant articles, which I then try to read and write a memo (if I decide using my triage technique that memo-ing the paper is worth my time). As you can see, I searched Google Scholar for “ethical bottled water” and found a few articles that are relevant. The problem with Google Scholar is that sometimes, depending on the keywords and sequence, you end up having to sift through several pages’ worth of results. In this case, both the Hawkins and Brei and Bohm articles are present in both searches, which means they might be relevant to my search.

As you can see, the set of results and citations you will get changing the wording slightly may be completely different, which is why it is important to make sure that you use different combinations of keywords. See the results of a different set of keywords related to ethics, branding and bottled water.

The second one is a narrow Mendeley keyword search, as I show in the figure below. I search my 6,000 entries’ database on Mendeley for specific keywords. Usually (and Mendeley is very good at this), the top 5 items in the search will be pretty relevant to what I am trying to find. Below you can see the citations for the top 5 entries that are specific to “human right to water”, “policy” and “implementation”.

In both cases, what I do is I read the article, then quickly search through the references’ list and make sure that I have read some of the references. I usually find one or two articles that are very relevant to my research and that have been cited often. I highlight those, and remark if I have read them, or if I haven’t, whether they look relevant enough to try and find them and read them. Here is where concept saturation comes in.

Concept saturation:

I define concept saturation as the point where I am seeing the same citations repeated on a regular basis. I borrow this term from qualitative research methods, as it is also the point when you are seeing the same concepts repeated over and over again. For example, I think much of the work around ethical bottled water has been done in the marketing literature from a branding perspective. Methodologically, I have seen most of the work using qualitative discourse analysis. So, when I start seeing yet another piece on bottled water branding using qualitative methods, I think I have reached concept saturation. Time to skip to a different approach. For example, the work of Gay Hawkins has been fundamental in developing the notion of bottled water as an assemblage. I have looked through basically all her citations, and read all her work. See the Mendeley search below.

Basically, I have used Gay Hawkins’ work to map everything scholarly that there is and that is related to a “material culture” approach to understanding bottled water. Once I found that every single author I had in the short list of cites that I had to review in my citation tracing process were associated or citing Hawkins’ work, I knew I had reached concept saturation. Another idea that I have seen floating in the bottled water literature is the idea of “accumulation by dispossession” promoted by David Harvey, and implemented by Jaffee and Newman, so I went and read their work until I found no more citations associated with this idea.

Results’ mind-mapping

Finally, once I’ve read a number of papers using citation tracing (seeing who has cited whom, and whether their work is useful), and to ensure concept saturation, I map these citing relationships and ideas in a mind map. Results’ mind mapping is important because it allows you to both have a clear overview of the literature and a map of who is citing whom, and where your own work may fit, as well as the different gaps in the literature you might be able to fill with your own research and literature review. To do these mind maps, many people use mind mapping software, but I usually do it by hand. (UPDATE – I wrote a blog post on mind mapping using MindManager from MindJet. The downside: IT’S SUPER EXPENSIVE)

Below, I show a brief and incomplete mind map of the literature on policy transfer, policy learning and policy convergence. If you are a scholar of public policy, most likely you will recognize these names.

Obviously you can make the results’ mind map as large as you may need it. When I am mapping a large body of literature I usually do it on a whiteboard or corkboard and use Post-It adhesive notes (one per each relevant author or concept). Then I link the different ideas in the mind map using different materials, depending on which surface I use to create the mind map. I also love putting the mind map on paper digitally, using mindmapping software like MindManager.

I am hopeful describing the processes I follow to undertake my literature review is helpful to you. I know it’s kind of weird for someone as connected and tech-savvy not to use a mind mapping technique that is more modern, but I am sure you can hardly find better tools than using hand-written notes.

Posted in academia, research, research methods.

Tagged with academic writing, AcWri, literature review, productivity, research, research methods, writing.

6 comments

By Raul Pacheco-Vega – June 15, 2016

My Fall 2016 schedule: building flexibility into my calendar

One of the criticisms I received when I first published my weekly template was that I had never built buffers into my calendar. It is, in many ways, a fair criticism. You can’t be ready to do what you’re scheduled to do All The Time. Here’s the backstory to why I wrote such a strict calendar: when I first read Tanya Golash-Boza’s post on how she built a weekly template, I figured “yay, FINALLY someone validated my Type A personality and I can basically schedule EVERY SINGLE MINUTE OF MY DAMN LIFE”.

We all know how well that went.

Last academic year, I started experimenting with building buffers and relaxing my requirements. I still aim for 10 hours a week of writing, and I have scheduled pretty strict and rigid blocks of time for my teaching and lecture preparation, making myself available for office hours and to meet with my students for supervision. But everything else? I can do basically anything with that time.

Since this is my heavy teaching semester (2 courses, both undergraduate, both in English) I decided I wouldn’t be doing any traveling nor fieldwork. The research time I use will be for either quantitative analysis using datasets I’ve already either created or assembled, or qualitative data analysis of fieldwork I’ve already done (remember I went to Madrid for two weeks? Those field notes are still quite valuable for writing up).

You can now see my new Fall 2016 schedule, with plenty of time built into the calendar. Many people will wonder if I work 40 hours or more or less – I can’t really say, since I didn’t calculate the number of hours I need to do X or Y activity per week, with the exception of 8 hours of teaching, 10 hours of writing, and 6 hours of lecture preparation, plus office hours and graduate student supervision (a quick calculation I made puts me to about 33 hours per week of scheduled time).

You may wonder why I didn’t budget 16 hours of class lecture preparation (I usually budget 2-3 hours per hour of lecture to prepare lecture slides, read, train for my lecture delivery). The two courses I’ll be teaching (Public Policy Analysis and Regional Development) are both courses I’ve already taught at least once, and I already have lecture slides, in-class exercises, etc.

Also, much of what I’ll be doing this month of June will be preparing lectures for the fall (that is, front-loading lecture preparation). Thus, I believe 6 hours of lecture preparation will be enough. I already learned my lesson about redesigning two entire courses while attempting to do fieldwork and go to conferences and still write (I got terribly sick twice in two years).

You may also notice I didn’t schedule “self-care” into my calendar. That’s because the assumption that anything after my activities (e.g. on Monday and Wednesday, anything after 2:30pm, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays after 4:30pm) is my own time. I work really hard in the mornings and early afternoon, and then it’s time to do my own stuff. If I preach that we should seek balance between academic and personal life, I should be practicing it as well.

I feel quite comfortable with this new calendar. It doesn’t put much pressure on me other than to do my teaching, write every day, and meet with my students. Maybe it was high time for me to follow Mark Carrigan’s advice and NOT schedule my life to the every minute.

There ARE actual, real disadvantages to being a Type A!

Posted in academia.

Tagged with organization, productivity, schedule.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – June 5, 2016

Remunicipalization in Latin America: Where are we now and where are we going? (my #LASA2016 talk)

I am certainly out-conferenced, but I would not have participated in this year’s Latin American Studies Association (LASA) conference if I hadn’t committed to join a great panel chaired by Clara Irazabal from Columbia University and organized by my friend and coauthor Marcela Gonzalez-Rivas from University of Pittsburgh. It was in New York City (Manhattan) and I ended up only flying in and flying out for my presentation, so I didn’t actually develop a full paper (yet).

Instead of actually writing a full-fledged paper, I gave a slightly retouched version of a previous paper I presented at GIGAPP 2014 in Madrid (Spain) but updated with my new dataset and the conceptual framework I presented at the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago this year. Basically, the paper’s premise was that de-privatization (also known as remunicipalization) is a trend that has started to gain traction in the past few years despite Brookings Institutions’ push for private municipal water supply. I also presented some data from the Ramos Arizpe case, the only Mexican case (to date) that we know of remunicipalization, and a case I’ve studied myself. The Mexican National Water Commission (CONAGUA) has pushed quite aggressively for municipalities to outsource their water utility management to private companies.

Such is the case in the city I live in right now, Aguascalientes, which has private water supply. The fact that the federal government pushes for private water supply is somewhat bewildering, but even more so that they do so quite openly. Obviously, as I’m a fierce critic of privatization of municipal water utilities, I’m not popular with them (I’ve written extensively about the fallacy of efficiency in privatization of public service delivery and on the politics of water privatization in Mexico).

Me presenting at #LASA2016 Photo credit Dr. Bernardo Bolaños, UAM

Here is the slide deck of my presentation, and below is the paper’s abstract. Once I’ve finished it I’ll publish it too.

Remunicipalization in Latin America: Where are we now and where are we going?
Raul Pacheco-Vega
Assistant Professor, Public Administration Division
Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE)
A paper presented at the 2016 Meeting of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA)
New York City, New York, USA
May 29th, 2016

Remunicipalization is one model of public service delivery where the local government takes back provision by ending private concession contracts. In the words of Wollman and Bakker (both of whom have used the “swinging pendulum” metaphor), we’re moving from public to private to public again. While the vast majority of the literature on remunicipalizations has focused on European cases, we have reached a point where there are enough instances of Latin American municipalities taking back drinking water supply back into their hands. This paper uses a unique dataset on global remunicipalizations (Kishimoto, Lobina and Petitjean 2015, N=235) and focuses its analysis on Latin American countries. In the paper, I examine the factors that drove remunicipalization of water supply and discern potential causal mechanisms for this de-privatization movement. I argue that, while we have a larger number of cases of remunicipalization, it is hard to discern if there is enough data for a generalizable enough theory of water supply de-privatization. In light of this insight, I propose a research agenda on the potential effectiveness of remunicipalization as a strategy to strengthen local water utilities, bring the public back in and provide more democratic engagement in water policy in Latin America.

My friend and coauthor Dr. Marcela Gonzalez-Rivas (University of Pittsburgh) presenting her #LASA2016 paper

Overall, I have to admit I had a really good time. I am looking forward to working with Marcela on the second part of her research paper (we are coauthoring a paper now), and Clara Irazabal is an excellent discussant. On the personal side, I saw a lot of really good academic friends, I managed to squeeze some time to eat All The Ethiopian Food in Hell’s Kitchen, I wandered through Times Square, Chelsea, but still, I think I need to lay low at least for a couple of weeks. My photo set from LASA can be found here.

Posted in academia, conferences.

Tagged with conferences, LASA, LASA2016.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – June 2, 2016

My own workflow: Strategically reading and summarizing the literature

I remember when I was doing my PhD I wanted to Read All The Things. This was particularly true during my very first year, when I started preparing for my comprehensive exams. I was (and in many ways, still am) a walking, living and breathing literature review. I love reading, and since I was lucky enough to have my parents send me to one of those courses for speed reading (they do work, trust me) when I was a little child, I read at a very fast speed. This ability to speed read enables me to survey a broad range of literatures without having to worry too much about the time I spend reading. I am well aware that for people who do not read fast, this is a huge problem. And sadly, a problem I don’t have the answer for.

In the past few weeks, I’ve been sharing my own workflow in hopes that it may help graduate students, early career scholars and maybe even some senior professors. I’ve written about how I now focus on one task at a time, how I budget my time to accomplish what I set out to do in a particular day or week, and how I break down the work in accomplishable tasks. I know I have my own quirks and these processes work for me, and may not work for everyone. I’m aware of the privilege I have by having time to actually read. But what I thought I’d share in this post is a little bit of truth that many people may not be aware of. The truth is that I read, summarize and write memos about articles, books and book chapters in a strategic way. I don’t engage deeply with All The Things. Since I work on several projects at the same time, I often need to jump from one body of works to another. This makes my life complicated because I don’t simply engage in a reading spree for one particular topic, but usually cover several areas of research. For example, just this week, I’m reading about:

Ethically-branded bottled water
Field experiments in various fields – public management, political science, strategic management
The human right to water and sanitation
The ethics of fieldwork in vulnerable communities
Implementation theory in public policy research
Event history analysis for political science
Sanitation (both water and waste), the most recent scholarship in the field.

I have decided (since a pretty long while ago) that even if I speed-read every single article, I can only engage, summarize, highlight and read in-depth a few chosen ones. Yes, I integrate reading into my workflow, but I don’t have unlimited time to read (I wish I did, though!) Note that I do read every article, though many people who write about academic writing may recommend what many call “skimming” (e.g. reading the article’s abstract, conclusions, and selected parts of the paper). But you can also skim without any problem.

The way I choose which articles I highlight, write on the margins and deeply engage with (including writing a memorandum about it) is simple, I choose a piece for this in-depth process…

if the article is written in an easy-to-read manner
if the article contains a lot of rich theoretical or empirical analysis
if the article is a necessary piece of an argument (or a specific method)
if the article resonates with my own research or challenges it in a serious manner
if the article poses an interesting puzzle

For example, I downloaded about 6 pieces on bottled water today. Two of them were spectacularly well written, and one was pretty dense (governmentality and biopolitics kind of stuff), but it had important insights. I read all the articles, but engaged deeply with only three of them, which I chose on the basis of whether I could get a rich, dense, descriptive memorandum out of engaging with the articles. So I wrote analytical memos out of three articles, even though I speed-read 6.

Also, when I budget time to read, I make sure I leave the most important articles for when I feel fresh instead of when I am exhausted. For example: I am presenting a research design for a field experiment on bottled water in a few weeks, at a conference. I need to read about field experiments to prepare for the presentation. So I downloaded two pieces on field experiments (both in public policy), and I left them aside to read and write tomorrow (Thursday). I was already a bit tired from reading all day today (Wednesday) and therefore, I knew I wouldn’t be able to engage deeply with those.

Finally, when I summarize the literature, I process manuscripts, papers, books, book chapters and articles, all in one sitting. That is, I make sure to do everything that is associated with one specific task at the same time. So, for example, when I download an article, I upload it to my Mendeley database, clean the reference, print the article out, add the plastic label, staple the article, read, highlight, write notes, type the memo, upload it to my Evernote. So, basically – I process one article at a time, all the way through, instead of leaving all the uploading of PDFs on to Mendeley to when I’m bored, etc.

Hopefully my decision-making process for strategically reading makes sense to my readers! It certainly does for me 🙂

Posted in academia, writing.

Tagged with academia, productivity, workflow, writing.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – June 2, 2016

My daily workflow: Budgeting time and scheduling projects

The fact that I have many different interests and that I am working on a broad variety of projects makes me more prone to letting things slip away. Thus, to protect my own time from others, and to stop me from procrastinating and making my life easier when working, I budget time for each thing I am supposed to do. And I guard that time jealously.

Given that one of the things that annoys me the most is when people use and appropriate (or misuse) my time, I’m very protective of my daily schedule. I hate when people schedule meetings at my post productive times (9, 10 and 11 am meetings really break into my work day). At the same time, I also hate when I see my time running away from me as I am distracted or procrastinating (yes, I’m a human being, and I, too, procrastinate).

Protecting my time is easier to do when I have a pretty specific schedule for when I do things (I no longer try to schedule my life to the very last minute, but instead I have built time buffers into my day. Also, I relaxed my rules so that I don’t feel guilty when I am not doing the work I was supposed to). Nevertheless, I do have a pretty solid structure for my day. For example, I write in the very early hours of the morning. This is the time when my brain is most ready to write and there are very few distractions. I meet with my students in the afternoons. I leave administrative stuff for those days when I can’t concentrate.

And most importantly, I break down the work I do in manageable pieces. For each piece, I budget time. So, for example, I knew that realistically, I wouldn’t be able to do much work on the Thursday, as I would be teaching a make-up class (the last lecture of my Public Policy Analysis class), and reviewing application files for 3 tenure-track positions. I also needed to read the final thesis draft of one of my Masters’ students, and meet with another student on whose Masters’ program I’m a committee member. I also knew that I had to submit the grant proposal review by Friday, so I had to prioritize teaching, grant reviewing, and my students. Everything else had to take a second place (my students are near to graduation so I can’t delay reading their work).

So this is what my Thursday looked like:

6:30-8:00am Wake up, shower, have breakfast, read
8:00-9:00am Read Laura’s thesis
9:00-9:20am Drive to campus
9:30-11:00am Prepare class and re-read lecture notes
11:00-11:30am Deal with administrative stuff (library requests)
11:30-1:30pm Final lecture Public Policy Analysis
1:30-2:15pm Meeting with Pavel M. about his thesis
2:15-3:00pm Lunch
3:00-4:00pm Review candidate files
4:00-4:40pm Drive Mayeli home, drive myself home
4:40-6:40pm Nap (this is something I really need to keep my health)
6:40-7:00pm Drive myself to campus
7:00-9:00pm Review candidate files, summarize my choices
9:00-9:30pm Read notes for ISA 2017 paper abstract with Amanda Murdie
9:30-10:00pm Drive myself home

Thus as you can see I decided to focus on only three outcomes I could accomplish: submit my choices for job talk participants, approve Laura’s thesis and teach my last lecture of the semester. Making my to-do list too long makes me feel stressed and nervous and I feel paralysed. I worked 10 hours and only completed 3 things, if you think about it. But those were the 3 most important things I needed to do.

So, for example, for yesterday (Friday) my schedule looked as follows (you’ll notice I’m not waking up at 4:30am this week, this is because I’m having problems adjusting to the extreme hot weather we are having in Aguascalientes).

7:00-8:00am Breakfast, read
8:00-9:00am Write blog post
9:00-10:00am Read project grant proposal I’m supposed to review
10:00-11:00am Shower, get ready, head to campus
11:00am -12:00pm Meeting with Rafa (my PhD student)
12:00pm-12:30pm Social media
12:30-1:30 pm Peer review (write grant proposal review) for CONACYT
1:30pm-2:00pm Lunch
2:00-3:30pm Deal with library requests.
3:30-5:00pm Read articles for peer-reviews for International Journal of the Commons, Policy Sciences and Global Environmental Politics
5:00-5:30pm Read draft notes from meeting with Amanda Murdie
5:30-6:30pm Write draft ISA 2017 abstract.
6:30-7:00pm Clean up my office, prepare list of To-Do things for next week.
7:00-7:20pm Drive myself home
7:20-9:50pm Dinner, grocery shopping, packing for LASA 2016
10:00pm Go to sleep

In reality, I knew that I would need at least 2 hours to write the grant proposal review, and 2-3 more to read the peer review manuscripts I have to do, plus at least 1.5 hours to write a draft abstract. I accomplished everything I needed to, but I know for a fact I have outstanding work for next week. Given that I only mark (in pink ink) what I did accomplish, I have a list of what I have to prioritize for either the weekend (I’m heading to LASA 2016) or early next week.

If you check my previous post on breaking down the work in achievable tasks, you’ll notice my Friday had very specific time budgets:

7:30am-9:30 am Write 600 words on Jane Jacobs and Elinor Ostrom
9:30am-11:00am Meetings with students (undergraduate breakfast and graduate coffee)
11:00am-12:00pm Edits on my book chapter for the Kauffer book
12:00-1:00pm Meeting with Miriam
1:00-1:30 pm Provide feedback to the book chapters on polycentricity.
1:30-2:00pm Lunch with my colleagues
2:00-3:00pm Read the paper and provided comments in writing
3:00-5:00pm Seminar with Miriam Grunstein
5:00-6:00pm Brief meetings with my research assistants and students and colleagues
6:00-6:45pm Drive Miriam to the airport.
6:45pm-8:45pm Drive to Leon.

As you can see, I couldn’t do everything I would have wanted to, but at least I achieved 7 things in the entire day, including 3 writing tasks. That’s how I keep myself motivated: budgeting time, scheduling both work time and adequate buffers, and breaking down the work in achievable tasks, often focusing solely on just one thing at a time.

Posted in academia.

Tagged with organizing.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – May 28, 2016

My daily workflow: Breaking down the work in accomplish-able tasks

I won’t lie: I used to be the kind of guy who would write endless, long To-Do lists. I would list EVERYTHING I need to do. At first, it felt like I was being thorough. “Here is ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING I NEED TO ACCOMPLISH BY X DATE“. If you’ve ever written long To-Do lists, you probably know how this story ends (you’re exhausted by the time you’re on task 3 and just want to crawl under a rock and cry yourself to sleep).

I have been experimenting with breaking down the work in accomplish-able tasks for a while now. Instead of writing exhaustive lists of the things I need to do, I look at my month, week and day, and focus on achieving certain goals by a specific date. For example, take this week: I had specific writing goals, agreed to participate in two Masters students’ committee meetings (at CIDE and FLACSO), had a work meeting with colleagues who are also dear friends at El Colegio de Mexico, and had a guest speaker come into CIDE on Friday, plus a series of meetings with new students in the undergraduate and masters’ programmes.

Listing everything would have simply made me go beserk and I would have had nothing accomplished. So, I broke down my week in 4: Monday, which is my teaching day – although I had a guest speaker from CIDE Santa Fe; Tuesday, which I had to spend doing a variety of administrative and project tasks that I couldn’t do on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday which were days when I flew to Mexico City and had meetings, and Friday (where I had lots of meetings and a seminar). But the most important thing I did was that I PRIORITIZED TASKS, GOALS AND OUTCOMES.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to do everything I wanted this week from my extended, long To-Do List. So I prioritized. This is how I broke down my Wednesday, Thursday and Friday:

WEDNESDAY
– Drive to the airport
– Fly into Mexico City
– Travel from the airport to CIDE Santa Fe
– Meeting with my division chair
– Miscellaneous meetings with colleagues at CIDE
– Meeting with Alfredo, my Masters’ student, to go over his presentation for Thursday
– Travel to El Colegio de Mexico for a book presentation
– Travel to my hotel

THURSDAY
– Read (no #AcWri because I haven’t had enough sleep) for a bit
– Travel to CIDE Santa Fe
– Attend Alfredo’s presentation – provide feedback afterwards
– Travel to FLACSO
– Attend Pavel’s committee meeting – attend a meeting on fracking and water (briefly)
– Travel to El Colegio de Mexico
– Lunch with Fernando, Veronica and Vicente
– Travel to the airport
– Fly into Aguascalientes
– Read on the plane, take notes
– Travel home
– Unpack

FRIDAY

Writing goals
– Write 600 words on Jane Jacobs and Elinor Ostrom for The Nature of Cities
– Provide feedback on 2 chapter abstracts for the polycentricity book
– Rewrite my book chapter abstract on bottled water and water insecurity for Edith Kauffer’s edited volume

Meetings
– Breakfast with incoming cohort at the undergraduate level (Bachelor of Public Policy)
– Meeting with incoming cohort at the Masters’ level (Masters of Environmental Economics)
– Meeting with Miriam Grunstein (our guest speaker)
– Lunch
– Seminar

Reading
– Read and write comments on Miriam’s paper

Travel
– Drive Miriam to the airport

Administrative
– File away Malini Ranganadrath’s articles that I had read already.

As you can see, this week I didn’t finish any book chapters. I didn’t write a new paper. Heck, I didn’t even clean my desk before leaving for the airport. This is how my desk ended Friday evening.

BUT I accomplished EVERYTHING on my To Do List. And that made me feel empowered to come back on Monday and do all the things I want to do. Crossing EVERYTHING off of my To Do List made me feel accomplished. The list was manageable (3 writing tasks) and specific.

The great thing about breaking down the work in accomplish-able tasks is that it allows me to also BUDGET TIME. I knew that arriving into my office at 7:30am would give me about 2 hours before the breakfast meeting with students. Thus, I wrote the 600 words on Jane Jacobs and Elinor Ostrom between 7:30 and 9:30am. Then, I met with students until 11am. I made the edits on my own book chapter between 11am and 12 noon. I met with Miriam from 12 to 1pm, and then worked for 30 minutes on providing feedback to the book chapters on polycentricity. From 1:30 to 2pm, I had lunch with my colleagues, and then from 2 to 3, I read the paper and provided comments in writing that I then delivered during the seminar. From 5 to 6pm, after the seminar, I just had brief meetings with my research assistants and students and colleagues, and then at 6pm I drove Miriam to the airport.

A really busy day, but one where I felt I had accomplished A LOT.

Posted in academia, writing.

Tagged with academic life, My daily workflow, organizing.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – May 21, 2016

« Previous Next »

How to respond to reviewer comments: The Drafts Review Matrix

Overcoming structural barriers to reducing bottled water consumption

Synthesizing different bodies of work in your literature review: The Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump (CSED) technique

Designing and implementing a Publications Planner

How to do a literature review: Citation tracing, concept saturation and results’ mind-mapping

My Fall 2016 schedule: building flexibility into my calendar

Remunicipalization in Latin America: Where are we now and where are we going? (my #LASA2016 talk)

My own workflow: Strategically reading and summarizing the literature

My daily workflow: Budgeting time and scheduling projects

My daily workflow: Breaking down the work in accomplish-able tasks

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