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On multiple academic projects’ management, time management and the realities of what we think we can accomplish in a certain period of time versus the realities of what we actually are able to.

This blog post has a terribly long blog post, but I think it’s worth including it in its entirety. I recently taught two workshops where I was asked about calendar management.

I now have 5 core things in my calendar:
– my own writing time block (4:30am-6:30am)
– the writing time I spend with Amanda Bittner and the feminist mafia posse
– the writing time I spend with Jeff Guhin, Mirya Holman and the #FinishingOurBooks crowd
– my teaching commitments (I teach on Thursdays)
– meetings (with students, colleagues, etc.)

But, like everything, my life changed, so did my priorities, and so did my workload. While I still had a relatively freeing approach to working, where I Worked on One Paper Every Day (a different one, particularly with coauthors), WOPED ALSO stopped working at some point.

I noticed that switching up tasks, projects and research streams was making it incredibly hard to concentrate.

Yes, I work on a very broad range of areas: I study bottled water, transnational environmental activism, homelessness, policy transfer, research methods, etc. Switching bodies of literature, empirical research methods and fields makes it really hard to regain momentum. For example, right now I’m working on revisions to my book on bottled water. BUT I also want to read up on the politics of public health policy. AND on homelessness.

WHAT IS WORKING FOR ME NOW?

What’s working for me now (as of 2021, pandemic and all), is to block time to work on a specific project (my bottled water book, or R&Rs, etc.), and when I do, I JUST think about it and put other wonderful ideas I have or readings I want to do on the shelf for a while.

I have full control of my calendar, though, and I am grateful for this. I can say “I prefer having meetings in the afternoon because I write in the mornings”, and the work-from-home approach has made it easier for me to schedule naps (which I require to function) and flex time.

My meeting times have shortened (though I have noticed, interacting with Mexican colleagues across other institutions, that for many, their own bad meeting habits have remained throughout the pandemic – making meetings longer than they should be).

Zoom tires me, though.

3) In your calendar, block both the academic/scholarly/work stuff AND the personal stuff. The latter ALSO requires A LOT of time.

4) Allow yourself flexibility, insert buffers in your calendar, don’t over-schedule every single thing, note down the major commitments you have.

5) Extend yourself AND others grace. We are all struggling through the pandemic.

6) To the extent possible, try to work on projects of the same Research Stream/topic.

7) Remember: YOU DO YOU. Everyone is different, and we need to shun the neoliberal idea of “productivity”.

I really do hope this blog post will be helpful to people. Also search my blog for a series I did on Project Management for Academics.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – June 17, 2021

A sequential strategy for teaching how to write a literature review

I think one of the drawbacks of knowing my blog so well (as its writer!) is that I don’t reflect often enough on the various sequences of blog posts that others (particularly faculty, post-doctoral researchers and early career scholars) can use to teach my techniques. When I get hired to teach a workshop, I pick and choose from my website and produce handouts that include links to specific blog posts, so that I can then help people learn specific strategies, techniques and heuristics. But this morning, a request for help really made me think deeply about how I DO teach my students, thesis advisees and research assistants how to produce literature reviews. My approach is sequential and scaffolded, thus the title of this blog post.

Reading highlighting scribbling annotating

My sequential strategy can be summarized as follows: I teach my students how to quickly read and absorb material using the AIC method and my template, then how to systematize their readings’ notes using the Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump (CSED) method, and then how to build a scholarly output. I teach how to produce three levels of scholarly products (classified by degree of complexity): banks of synthetic notes, rhetorical precis and memorandums, annotated bibliographies and literature reviews, as I’ve previously outlined. The Twitter thread below outlines my approach.

The process (when I train RAs and students) then looks like this:

Once they’ve started gaining competency in AIC+CSED (which I encourage by telling them to survey the literature and JUST focus on filling up rows of CSED – drawing from their AIC skim), I teach them how to do an Annotated Bibliography. THEN we move on to the Literature Review.

I want to acknowledge Dr. Ali Fitzgibbon for reminding me of the importance of the double-round mind-map. It wasn’t until this morning when she articulated the idea of the double mind map in a tweet that it really cemented the process I follow and how I, too, do two mind maps of the literature (pre- and post-). And I also want to acknowledge Dr. Christina Ballico for reminding me (and others) that annotated bibliographies can be an intermediate step towards a literature review.

Reviewing the literature and mapping scholarship

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – June 15, 2021

Time, energy and health: Three considerations for academic commitment and project planning

I’ve been working through some ideas on planning and project management for academics, as I’ve been asked to deliver more project management and planning workshops for academics over the past few months. Thinking deeply about these things allows me to consider how different elements play out in how we manage our academic commitments and how we do project planning. This post outlines my reflections.

As someone who suffered through chronic pain, chronic fatigue, psoriasis-eczema-dermatitis, I have become keenly aware of 3 things that we believe are in infinite supply: Energy, Time and Health.

Everything Notebook 2021

I’ve said a lot of “yes” to things that I believe I will be healthy for, I will have the time and energy to do them. Well, guess what? When I travel, I get super tired now. I’ve had to travel three times over the past 3 weeks. The result: I’m exhausted and behind on everything.

These feelings of exhaustion and overwhelm led me to engage in self-reflection. I said “NO” to bidding on a project where I’m basically the most qualified scholar to do the project. I said “NO” to teaching a class I’ve perfected over the years, one where I already have the slides and reading packet prepared. Why? Because I have limited time and energy.

I’m literally barely getting through the massive number of “yes” I said (when I had the energy, health and time to do them), and feeling anxious about this made me realize that one of the best ways to teach project management is to showcase when something didn’t go well.

Generally speaking I’m almost always in control of my agenda and my projects. It’s when I say “yes” to something without consulting first with my overall global planning scheme that I screw up.

Even my mother noticed: “but… you’re always so organized!”

Well, yes Mom except when I let something slide.

What I tell everyone who attends my workshops on planning and project management: The time you spend planning is super important and will prove invaluable when you’re confronted with feelings of overwhelm.

Now if I could synthesize my learning, I would say, from my experience:

  • say “yes” to projects that you’re 100% certain you have the time, energy and health to do.
  • frequently and systematically monitor yourself so you can detect when you no longer have time, energy or health to do something you committed to.
  • generally speaking, assume EVERYTHING will take 2-3 times longer than you originally planned.
  • – always (if you can, of course) insert “buffers” onto your calendar — blocks of time that will allow you to rest in between activities.
  • saying “NO” is healthy and ok.
  • And perhaps the most useful lesson I have learned: saying “I am no longer able to do X, even though I had originally committed to do it. Sorry.” is ok. Obviously it helps if you help find a replacement, but it’s also healthy to admit you have ran out of time and energy.

I really hope these reflections are useful to others in planning their workload, particularly under these complex situations (COVID19, work-from-home, etc.)

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – June 3, 2021

Writing an End-of-The-Month Achievements Review: Making *everything* count

Everything Notebook 2021One of my biggest challenges as someone who is a Virgo, Type A, Upholder, is to avoid the pressure of wanting to Do All The Things. My time is limited, my physical energy is too. Often times, I also fall prey to the trap of devaluing my achievements. Yes, I read several drafts of my students’ theses, I met with them, I followed up on research projects through email and Telegram interactions, and yet I frequently feel like I have not done nearly enough. I believe this nagging feeling is a result in part of the Taylorist approach to academia: how many words have you written, how many pages have you drafted, how many publications have you gotten out, how many papers do you have under review? And even though I have publicly pushed against this Taylorism in academia I still feel like I need to prove that I’ve worked A LOT and done A LOT.

And yes, I know I’m the author and a big proponent of the Two Things A Day Strategy and the Granular Planning and Rules of Threes Paradigm that proposes to ONLY plan to do 3 things per day. I sometimes go against my own wise advice.

Post-It To Do and Weekly Plans

Enter the End-of-The-Month Achievements Review:

Often times, we don’t even realize how much we are contributing to scholarly life (to our discipline, our field, our colleagues and peers, our institution). Writing what you did over the course of the month reminds you of that (beyond surviving, which is a success in & of itself). To be perfectly clear: surviving is a success in and of itself and keeping yourself, your family alive and together is also a success. This approach intends to make visible all the invisibilized work that accompanies the work-from-home approach.

I sometimes don’t even realize all the things I’ve done until I do an End-of-the-Month Achievements Review. And yes, I DO include everything. Absolutely EVERYTHING. Meetings with students. Formal and informal mentoring. Service to the community, my field and my discipline(s). Doing an End-of-the-Month Achievements Review helps me realize stuff I have accomplished and I didn’t even register those.

I hope this post encourages everyone who reads my blog to do an End-of-the-Month Achievements Review all the time.

We DO do A LOT OF STUFF.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – May 7, 2021

How to make your claim of novelty and contributions to the scholarly literature VERY clear with an example

THREAD: on making your claim of novelty and contribution to the literature VERY clear with an example from Dr. Lisa Pinley Covert’s book.

This blog post will be of interest to book writers, article and book chapter writers and thesis writers.
Page 1 Covert 2017
Note how Pinley Covert makes her research question clear. Pinley Covert establishes that this notion that San Miguel de Allende was on track to become an internationally-recognised tourist town that is prevalent in the mindset of a lot of people was (in her words) “not a foregone conclusion”.

She then clearly outlines research questions. Also note how Pinley Covert clearly lays out different alternative explanations (in a very well laid out “if X, then Y” format).

Note how (in the third screenshot, pp. xx) Pinley Covert also firmly expresses the multiple explanations SHE OFFERS that counter traditional narratives.

Page 2 Covert 2017This is a perfect, very clear example for our students on how to make your theoretical and empirical contributions VERY CLEAR, how to lay out the PUZZLE (what is it that your work does that counters mainstream narratives in the literature?). Also note how Pinley Covert makes it clear how her choice of San Miguel de Allende as a case study actually highlights broader, larger-scale historical processes (page xx). She then makes 3 theoretical and empirical contributions clear (laid out clearly in 1 paragraph each). Pinley Covert’s approach to writing her introductory pages is very much in line with advice I have provided elsewhere on my blog on how to write a good “Introduction” chapter.

Page 3 Covert 2017Pinley Covert’s introductory chapter offers several of her contributions, both empirical and theoretical. Note how she makes it clear what her contribution is: “This book unravels that history to show that, far from a foregone conclusion, San Miguel’s current status as an international tourist destination is the result of more than fifty years of individual agency, historical contingencies, and even happenstance” (Pinley Covert 2017, p. xx).

Pinley Covert also offers 3 distinct contributions to the literature. Something that I have emphasized with my own doctoral students is that they need to provide at least three distinct contributions (page xx, starting on paragraph 2).

When doing a book-style doctoral dissertation, 3 chapters could be empirical or theoretical or both. If someone writes a papers-based dissertation, each one of the 3 papers could be a distinct contribution as well. Pinley Covert does a fantastic job of suggesting how her book builds these three contributions and how they counter traditional narratives available in the literature.

I hope this blog post can help dissertation and thesis writers as well as book manuscript writers develop their main core ideas and highlight their contributions, given that there is no

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 29, 2021

Overcoming “Writer’s Block” with Index Cards and Memorandums

This past week, I taught 2 workshops, 1 for the Association of Iberian and Latin American Studies of Australasia (AILASA) and another one (over 2 days) for Rutgers University Newark’s School of Graduate Studies. During both workshops, I got asked the same question about fighting “writer’s block” (“Professor Pacheco-Vega, how do you fight Writer’s Block, what would be the easiest strategy to overcome it?”, and I answered with exactly the same strategy in both cases):

The trusty and humble “index card” and the memorandum.

Note how even writing two index cards can give me a strong enough “emotional boost” to compel me to write a memorandum.

Hopefully this blog post will be useful to you too.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 5, 2021

Delving into an entirely new topic and doing a literature review, performed with an example (on hospital ethnography)

A lot of people use my blog posts as guides to literature reviews, either for themselves or for their students. A lot of people use my blog posts as guides to literature reviews, either for themselves or for their students.

If you are a frequent reader of my blog, you probably know I’ve written a metric tonne of blog posts on specific items of the literature review (when to stop reading, how to create a mind-map of the literature, how to produce paragraphs of the lit review, etc.)

I understand these students’ concerns. Why should I be writing a literature review, what is its purpose and how do I go about it? After teaching undergraduate, and graduate (Masters, PhD) courses for a few years now, I think I understand the difficulty of understanding LRs.

What I have found most useful when I teach how to do Literature Reviews is explaining that to contribute to a body of research, we need to understand and know very well the landscape of scholarship that is out there. Like having a puzzle, and knowing where your own piece fits.

This universal, common understanding of what a literature review entails makes it easy to showcase methods and strategies across all three levels (undergrad, Masters, PhD). You are seeking to understand the big picture, and then narrow down your own topic to something manageable.

In that post, I explain that there are different ways to train yourself to do literature reviews. One way is to learn how to do annotated bibliographies and THEN move on to writing literature reviews. Another way is to learn how to create banks of notes and THEN do LRs.

Now, on to the typical question “when should I stop reading and start writing?”

HOW DO YOU PERFORM A LITERATURE REVIEW BASED ON MY BLOG POSTS?

Now, for the “live performance of how I conduct a literature review of a new topic”. My Grandma was a nurse, my Grandpa was a military doctor. Because of my poor health, and because I was obsessed with studying nursing growing up, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in hospitals. Because of COVID19, and also because I’ve recently recovered the friendship of a dear friend of mine from grade school who now is a Professor of Nursing and has a PhD, I’ve started thinking more about the politics and public policy aspects of understanding hospital operations.

I had been thinking about whether one could understand how health care professionals make decisions for a very long time. After all, I’ve spent a substantial amount of my life talking with doctors and nurses. And I’ve also cared for ill people (particularly my family). As someone who teaches Qualitative Methods, who has edited the International Journal of Qualitative Methods, who has published on ethnography and conducts ethnographies all over the world, I’m not unfamilar with the method at all.

HOWEVER I’VE NEVER done or studied hospital ethnography (until now, obviously). I recently wrote a grant proposal that, if funded, would allow me to conduct hospital ethnography across different sites/facilities/cities. I am not a health care professional, nor a medical anthropologist, so I would definitely need to partner with my good friend to do this.

Here is the thing: I believe one step in preparing literature reviews that we don’t properly teach and that helps students get out of the writing rut is asking them to DEFINE THEIR TERMS.

  • Do you want to write on Street-Level Bureaucrats (SLBs)? First question: What is a SLB? Who are the key authors on SLBs? (I know this answer, we all start with Lipsky, the book I tweeted about earlier).
  • Do you want to write on ethnography of illicit activity, such as drug trafficking? What is illict? How do we define illicit activity? How have scholars studied it?

Some Strategies to Generate Questions:

Now, on to the topic I’m researching right now: hospital ethnography. First step, as most of my blog readers will know, will be doing citation tracing, reading, annotating, systematizing, and writing memos until reaching concept saturation (and filling up rows of your Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump, CSED).

Below is a step-by-step performance of how I did Google Searching, citation tracing, CSED/memo writing, etc.

As I search for references, I link authors, concepts, ideas. Most of my mind-mapping happens in index cards.

Now, some instructions specific to educators:

Let’s get back to the actual process of doing the search/reading/reviewing the literature, and writing a memo.

As you can see, I am using “foundational” scholars to pivot around their scholarship and try to find new articles/improve my searches. Notice how I use Boaz’s, Van der Geest’s work to find OTHER articles that might be relevant, on hospital ethnography.

Now, this section describes how I REFINE MY GOOGLE SEARCH AND CITATION TRACING PROCESS. These refinements are necessary because I am not *just* writing about hospital ethnography but specifically, I am working on its application in Mexico. Thus I need to introduce keywords and refine my search, as well as track key authors.

A key tip: if you are doing a first pass at the literature, I recommend downloading a bunch of articles to go through using Batch Processing.

MOVING FROM READING ALL THE THINGS TO WRITING THE LITERATURE REVIEW

While I don’t really have time to work on this literature review, I know that this is a key element of the review of the literature, and therefore I had to make some time to show the beginnings of how I would write the LR section of my paper/grant proposal, because that’s usually THE KEY jump that students struggle with. They all ask me: “Professor, how do I go from “I’ve Read All Things” to WRITING the Literature Review?”

Everything, EVERYTHING, literally everything in the research process is driven by the Research Question (and that’s why my students and research assistants always hear me harping about the importance of asking good questions and designing good Research Questions).

Now, it should be obvious by looking at my Mendeley library that I haven’t read, downloaded, and processed EVERYTHING that there is to read on hospital ethnography. But at least, I have the beginnings. If you were to do a LR, you should be well on your way. Should I find time in my schedule to finish this LR on hospital ethnography, I should be able to continue this process (search, process, synthesize, write) in a relatively seamless fashion.

When I have the time, or when I MAKE the time, I can continue thinking through everything I read on hospital ethnography, and every new citation that scholars recommend to me. I am crossing my fingers that this will all it make sense to you all (my readers) now. My hope that by performing a “live” LR using my own blog posts might help you too.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 22, 2021

Revising the dissertation/thesis: From first draft to readable draft to shareable draft

This blog post focuses on using backcasting techniques and Overview Devices to revise the doctoral dissertation (chapter by chapter and/or the full draft). Applies to any thesis, for that matter. You can also extrapolate my strategy to revising a book manuscript as well (edited or solo author).

Revising a paper

Recently, a doctoral student asked me “Professor Pacheco-Vega, how can I revise the full draft manuscript to a state where my advisor and committee can/will want to read it?”.

Well, first off, advisors and committee SHOULD always want to read it, regardless of its state. But I understand the question. This is the ages-old issue of “when is my writing good enough for someone else to read it?” When I was younger, I was MUCH more of a perfectionist than I am right now (and by God, I AM a perfectionist, and no, I’m not gloating, it’s a flaw!)

I think that a basic standard for “can it be read by someone else” could probably be “doesn’t have typos, nor blatant grammatical errors, and has been at least looked at by someone else for consistency, coherency and articulation”.

Having said that, I also recognize that getting to THAT point is really hard. Personally, I know I sometimes send stuff that is NOT yet up to the highest standard because I am tired of it, and it’s better to have it reviewed than not. But I do try to make sure that there is enough material to work with, for review.

Anyhow, regardless of standards, it is MUCH easier for me as a thesis advisor to react to SOMETHING. So yes, sometimes I do ask my students to send me rough drafts, scattered notes, etc. Not everyone is me, and I do this to help my students overcome their fear of producing text.

At any rate, what I tell my students when they finish their theses is to just send me the entire draft AS IS. This document may have gaps, holes, and some errors. But at least I can react to it.

There are 2 stages of revision of a first draft:

1) First draft to READABLE draft.

2) Readable draft to REVISED FIRST DRAFT (after being reviewed by supervisor/mentor/advisor)

The first (getting a draft to the readable point) usually involves hiring an editor or a trusted friend to provide help with grammar/typos/structure, etc. IF you want to do it alone:

In short:

1) Revising Draft 1 to Readable Draft 1:
– check for structure, argument, typos, grammar, flow (use Pat Thomson, Rachael Caeley’s blog posts)

2) Revising Readable Draft 1 to Shareable Draft (for external readership, AFTER advisor’s comments)
– use DRM, GDN, DAT, DTP

Most advisors (mine did) prefer to read a draft and provide comments back BEFORE letting their students share with the committee (most committee members will want drafts they read approved by advisors). I prefer this strategy too (thus obtaining the “stamp of approval”)

All professors I know are overburdened, so it’s a good strategy to (a) inquire how much time they need (b) whether it is ok to send them a reminder that you need your draft back and (c) provide a roadmap of changes you’ve made/progress you have achieved, maybe include the DTP.

Obviously, supervisors and students will need a strategy for when advisors/committee members may not be as responsive as a student might need (deadlines, etc.) – I wish I had a good suggestion for this, but mostly, what I tell students is to maintain healthy dialogue w/advisors.

Students/graduate researchers may also want to include a copy of their DRM when providing a new draft (“I made these changes, I did not make these other ones because they didn’t apply/fit, etc.”) I always ask my students to send me their DTP alongside any new draft, so I can see how their thinking is evolving. I also usually ask for DAT and GDN as well.

Hopefully this strategy will be useful to my readers!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 3, 2021

The March 2021 #AICCSED Reading, Annotating and Systematizing Challenge

Keeping up with the literature is absolutely impossible, to be perfectly honest. There is just too much to read and too little time to do so, with multiple, competing demands for our time. My latest two blog posts (on “Strategies to Catch Up with the Literature” and on “Batch Processing Techniques”) focus on how to get “up-to-speed” with whichever scholarly body of work we are currently exploring. I did a quick poll to see if people would like to do yet another Reading, Annotating, Systematizing Challenge (as we did in September of 2020, October of 2018, and March-April of 2018). Apparently, people want to do it again this 2021, so here it goes.

#AcWri #AICCSED

The challenge operates like this: you declare on Twitter which article you will read on whichever day you will read it, using the hashtag #AICCSED, and then post a screenshot of the Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump (CSED or Excel Dump for short) row entry for that particular article. I call this strategy the #AICCSED Processing Protocol. We repeat this on a daily basis (you can do Monday through Friday or all 30 days of the month, it is up to you). The idea is that towards the end, you’ll be basically up to speed with at least SOME PARTS of the literature.

Hopefully this will be an interesting activity that moves you forward and not yet another burden on already over-burdened scholars! Do let me know how you do. You can track progress of how me and others are doing #AICCSED by clicking on this link.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 1, 2021

Batch-Processing groups of reading materials (articles or book chapters)

What does “Batch Processing” look like, in practice?

In a recent blog post, I showed you different strategies not to “stay on top of the literature”, but to “catch up with the literature” in a way that is gentle and still highlight inequities and challenges.

Annotating reading Everything Notebook etc

In about 2 weeks, I will be giving a guest lecture on polycentricity for a good friend of mine, Dr. Marcela Lopez-Vallejo at Universidad de Guadalajara. I wanted to “catch up with the polycentricity literature”. Now, this is a literature I have contributed to before (see this book chapter on evolutionary institutional change and polycentric water governance with Andreas Thiel and Liz Baldwin).

The advantage that using Batch Processing offerss, whether you distribute it over a week with a daily #AICCSED or devote a couple of hours on Fridays to this work, is that it allows you to reach Conceptual Saturation faster: by looking at interrelated papers, who might even be citing each other, you may end up being able to get a overview of the field (or at least, of the gaps you have in what you know about it).

Hopefully this detailed description of my Reading Materials’ Batch Processing method can be of help to my readers.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – February 27, 2021