It is very easy to do too much coding. Coding can become a problem because it is easy to do, when more analytical processes may seem difficult. You can code particular content within your sources as many times as you wish, and at as many nodes as you create. So you need to monitor and judge the usefulness of your coding.
Coding must have a purpose—it is never an end in itself. Watch for the following indicators that you may need to re-evaluate your coding strategy:
The purpose of the coding is hard to discern
The coding is largely descriptive (this text is about that topic) and not often more analytical (this issue obviously matters—why?)
You are easily bored whilst coding. If coding is generating new insights and questions, you won’t be bored
You are doing nothing else. Coding is only one way of expressing interpretation, and if you are engaged in purposive coding, it will be interspersed with other tasks like writing memos and querying the data
If you need to control the amount of time spent coding, but you are not confident that you can safely cut corners, a useful strategy is to do very broad-brush coding at general categories. Should these prove important later, you can return to work with the coded data in each node and code on to make more subtle nodes as required.