Understanding and solving intractable resource governance problems.
While I have a couple of blog posts pending (both by request, on how to prepare for comprehensive exams and how to build a research trajectory and a project pipeline for early career scholars), I wanted to write a post on something that I get asked about quite frequently. I arrived to the daily writing […]
– July 29, 2017
The first question I posed in the title of my blog post is one that all of my students (undergraduate and graduate) and most of my research assistants ask me: how do I know when I’ve read enough for a literature review? The answer is never clear cut, unfortunately. I am someone who loves reading, […]
– June 17, 2017
In previous posts I have addressed how to write rhetorical precis (very brief, four sentence summaries of the reading you are doing), synthetic notes (brief summaries of articles, focusing on the Abstract, Introduction and Conclusion as per the AIC method), and memorandums (longer, 1000-2000 word briefings that synthesize the content of an article, but also […]
– May 27, 2017
When I wrote my blog post on how to properly teach our students how to do Description vs Analysis in their academic writing, I linked to a number of resources. The one that Dr. Omar Wasow (Princeton University) recommended was “They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing“, edited by Gerald Graff and […]
– May 13, 2017
One of the research products I find most useful for an academic, short of openly-accessible datasets and code for replication is the annotated bibliography. As I have noted before, I consider the annotated bibliography an intermediate step between a bank of rhetorical precis, a bank of synthetic notes, and a fully-developed literature review. I consider […]
– April 28, 2017
I just came back from a week in Paris attending a meeting of field experiments’ scholars, and I took the opportunity to do some fieldwork. There are perfectly good reasons why I study French water governance, specifically in Paris, but that discussion is reserved for another post. When I do fieldwork or when I am […]
– March 8, 2017
For many years, I have advocated the Move Every Paper Forward Every Day (MEPFED) model of working. The MEPFED model basically says “every day, insert something related to each one of your research projects/papers on your To-Do list, so that collectively, every week you’ve moved most/all of your work forward“. MEPFED has worked for me […]
– February 4, 2017
I am very analog in everything I do, and research activity and workflow planning isn’t the exception. I don’t carry around many planners, nor do I dump everything in a cloud-based service like Evernote: I have a trusty Everything Notebook, where I schedule tasks I have to carry out for my research and teaching and […]
– February 2, 2017
This set of blog posts is intended to help undergraduate students, graduate students, and academics of all stripes find the best approach for them to read the ever-growing heaps of material. I’ve also collated here a couple of posts on time management. On skimming reading material and the importance of The Second Round of in-depth […]
– February 1, 2017
In my most recent Twitter poll, I asked what I could write about that would be most helpful to my readers (many of which are undergraduate and graduate students). I was asked to continue writing about reading strategies. The previous post I wrote on was what I think is the fastest technique you can use […]
– January 31, 2017
While I took a course in speed reading when I was very, very young (probably 8 or 9 years old, at the most), and I can speed read, there are times when I, too, find myself overwhelmed by the sheer amount of reading I need to do. While I’ve written before on how you can […]
– January 19, 2017
If there’s a downside to being a polymath is that everything looks interesting. If I don’t control myself (and I have to be quite strict about this), I can easily spend hours down the rabbit hole of Twitter and Facebook, or the depths of the internet. Distractions come easy to me, sad as this may […]
– January 9, 2017
While I write about ways in which I have improved my academic writing, or become more systematic and organized in the way I develop my literature reviews, and my own workflow, I am keenly aware that the techniques I use, the hacks I implement and the suggestions I provide can’t be implemented by every single […]
– January 7, 2017
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, […]
– December 28, 2016
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 […]
– December 22, 2016
When 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 […]
– December 5, 2016
While I have pushed for reflection and slow scholarship in my blog, I have to admit that some of the less romantic and glamorous parts of academia don’t particularly excite me. I call that “the grunt work“. This is grunt work: Cleaning up THIRTEEN references I just imported into Mendeley pic.twitter.com/OT3BX4QQge — Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega […]
– November 6, 2016
An important component of writing is reading and summarizing the literature. This exercise helps the author situate his/her work within the broader set of related works. I maintain a systematic process of reading and writing article summaries, but I normally do so in the form of long-form memoranda. Earlier this year, I had a conversation […]
– October 24, 2016
One of the things I’m an expert on is overwhelming myself with the sheer amount of work I have to do. In the past decade, I have slowly become better at simply reducing the size of my To-Do list and breaking down my workload into manageable tasks, at focusing on just one thing at a […]
– October 19, 2016
I was asked to write about tips for editing a research paper, since my Academic Writing and Literature Review posts seem to be quite popular. I have to confess that I don’t have any particularly insightful piece of advice to give, because here is the kicker: I HATE EDITING MY OWN PAPERS. I do it, […]
– September 2, 2016
It’s been an excellent few months for me, because I have been able to share more of my “tricks and tools of the trade” with people who read my blog, and readers seem to like how my workflow processes help them with their own. As always, I don’t provide “advice”. I simply share my experiences […]
– August 25, 2016
Some people who see how my daily workflow happens in real life seem to be taken aback by the fact that I synchronize my digital and analog daily and weekly plans. To them, it would appear as though I take longer to plan my life than to actually execute it. This isn’t the case. It’s […]
– August 16, 2016
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a strategy I use to keep myself motivated: the Quick Wins method. I use this method because I am actually someone who faces enormous challenges in keeping himself focused and motivated. Because I have so many different research interests and I study a relatively broad range of issues, […]
– July 29, 2016
One of the challenges I face when teaching my students how to write effective memos (memoranda, memorandums) is that I have developed my own method of memo-writing after reading dozens of books, book chapters, articles, and implementing some of those ideas. I’ve written so many memos that I don’t actually know whether to recommend a […]
– July 28, 2016
Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that I often post photographs of what I’m doing, reading, and (often times) eating. Yesterday, I posted photos of how I had cleaned up my campus office (I’m officially on holidays, although I had to come into the office for 3 days in a row […]
– July 22, 2016
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