In Oct 2020, I shared a rough draft of what I wrote up as a guideline on political science R1 job market for Caltech graduate students as I prepared to graduate. Seeing how many people came up to me and said this was helpful, especially the month-to-month to-do list, I pruned and polished it a bit more and am sharing this in a fixed repository where the URL is less likely to rot.
To read the document, click this link. Note that this is subject to the limited perspectives that I gathered from my own experiences and those around me.