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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

Project Planning Protocol – From idea to paper in one swift sequence

A few months back, Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom (assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, and someone I consider a dear friend) tweeted she was looking forward to organizing her academic life using the methods I’ve posted on my blog on the topic of Organization and Time Management. She called them “Get Your Life Together Academic Protocols”

People have asked me frequently if I have a series of posts that could help them from an idea to a paper, to managing their everyday academic and personal lives. The most recent request I received was from Glen Wright, from Academia Obscura fame.

I decided to post the sequence of blog posts I already have written that I think make most sense for someone to get organized using my methods.

Here are the 9 posts in tweet format. I posted them this way in case you want to retweet a specific one (clicking on the retweet icon will launch the Twitter page and enable you to retweet that specific post).

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – November 16, 2016

On getting a good night of sleep and the biphasic 6 + 1.5 hours cycle

I was recently asked by Chris Birdsall on Twitter how my sleep cycle works.

This question came about, I believe, because (a) I appear to be on Twitter all the time (which I’m not, read my post on my Twitter strategies) and (b) I appear like I don’t sleep at all (I actually love sleeping and naps, generally speaking).

This is a myth.

I sleep 7.5 hours per day which is about what just about any person should sleep (please exclude parents and those suffering from chronic insomnia). Yes, I wake up at 4am to write, but trust me, I do love me some sleep. There are people who have attempted polyphasic sleep cycles (where they take naps in between long periods of work). Honestly, after having tried it during my PhD (and failed miserably), I don’t believe in polyphasic sleep cycles.

The thing is, I DO believe in the biphasic model.

Remember, I’m not a sleep expert (though I DO know someone who IS). So, I am just sharing my experience and what I read before deciding on my current sleep cycle model. I had read somewhere that for someone to experience actual rest, they had to achieve deep sleep, and that being rested meant that we got several deep sleep cycles where each one of these lasts 90 minutes.

To calculate how much sleep I should get, I calculated the following: 1.5 hours times 4 is six hours, what some consider is the least amount of sleep you can get before suffering damage in your cognitive functions. Though apparently, sleeping more than seven hours may be non-optimal.

So I normally sleep 6 hours at night, and then I have a 1.5 hour nap at the “end of my day” (e.g. when I teach, this is normally at 3pm). Because I start working at 4 am, by noon I’m done with the day, and by 2:30pm I’m really exhausted. So I drive home and take a 90 minute nap, which usually leaves me recharged to do more stuff in the afternoon or evening. This also allows me to have some semblance of a social life, where my friends LOVE going out until 10pm (which is a total NO NO for me).

I try really hard to be in bed by 9pm so that if there’s some delay in how fast I fall asleep, I can be fully asleep by 10pm. Then, waking up at 4am is natural. My body is used to it. I’m also used to having a nap at 3pm or so. On weekends, I try as hard as I can to take as many naps as my body requires. During the week I only need one per day, but on weekends, for some reason, I need more sleep and I try hard to take as many naps as possible.

Sleeping well is a well-tried tool to improve academic performance, trust me (and the experts!)

My friend Melonie Fullick, who DOES study higher education, agrees that we need enough sleep.

I recognize that academic parents with toddlers and little children and scholarly people with chronic insomnia have a harder time to get enough sleep. I just hope we all could get enough sleep. It would make our academic lives much better. It’s dangerous and unhealthy to cheat ourselves of sleep.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – November 12, 2016

Getting writing done as a motivator to write more

Right now, as of November 11th, 2016, I have two journal articles under review, 3 accepted with changes, two book chapters in press, and I’m in the process of submitting one book chapter and two more articles that are ready for (thanks, #GetYourManuscriptOut and #AcWriMo for the additional motivation!). Strangely enough, I am really fired up to write more, even though I’m not doing AcWriMo.

#AcWri on the plane from Dallas to Leon

I am not 100% sure if my theory has any empirical evidence to back it up, but I have a hunch that getting writing done is an actual motivator to write more. Knowing that my stuff is out and that I’m crossing stuff off of my list is actually making me want to write, and to do more research. It may also be the fact that it’s the end of the year (or the end of the world as we know it, as of November 8th, 2016).

I also think my willingness to write more may also be correlated with the fact that the year (the actual year, not the academic one!) is ending, so I think I also want to have my work out for review. That’s the best advice I have ever gotten: to get my stuff out, and to have it reviewed and read.

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

My biggest frustration with myself has always been that I’m too much of a perfectionist, so sometimes putting words on paper worries me because I don’t know if they’re perfect of not. But as I’ve tweeted recently, the best advice I ever got was “get your stuff out for review”. And exactly that’s how the #GetYourManuscriptOut hashtag emerged.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – November 11, 2016