The Two-pen Method of Fieldwork Note-taking
Remember “lifehacks?” A few years back people just couldn't get enough of these clever tricks to solving life's biggest and littlest problems. They’re still around (as is the eponymous website), but the popularity of the term seems to have peaked in late 2014.
Google searches for "lifehack" since 2004
Maybe the problems are thornier. Maybe we're less sure of our solutions. Maybe we've finally found the serenity to live with the things we can't change. Maybe we hacked all the easy problems, and now we’re stuck with the unhackable ones.
Nonetheless, there's always ways for us to learn from each other. And honestly that's all that the lifehacks ever were – something that (presumably) worked for someone at least once and may or may not work for you under similar circumstances.
So here's a little note-taking hack that I came up with:
The Two-pen Method of Fieldwork Note-taking.
It’s pretty simple, actually. When you’re taking lots of handwritten notes over several days, carry a blue pen and a black pen with you, and alternate between them each day.
I developed this technique during a multi-week data-collection trip across Kenya when I was conducting multiple in-depth interviews every day, 6 days a week. My beloved notepads quickly blurred into an undifferentiated mass of scribbled notes spread across hundreds of pages. This made it difficult to quickly locate and reference past interview data on the fly, something that was sometimes necessary mid-interview. One day I inadvertently switched from a black pen to a blue one between interviews. The visible difference in color provided a clear and intuitive section break, so I started doing it deliberately, switching ink colors at the start of each day. The benefit was immediate; I could more quickly navigate and make sense of my notes while in the field, and it was also easier to get a sense of the interview sequence and zero in on specific conversations later on in the analysis phase.
I’m not generating nearly as much interview content at the moment, but I’ve retained the practice in my personal journal – it’s nice to see my daily output at a glance and to keep my place on the page when I'm rereading what I've written. I guess I could use more than just two colors, but I like to keep things simple, and keeping track of two pens is hard enough already (though I guess I could switch to one of these absolute units).
I'm sure I’m not the first person to come up with this approach, and I’m sure it probably won’t work for everyone, but it's a relatively simple lifehack that solves a real and persistent fieldwork problem.
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