This article takes as its point of departure an earlier paper which attempted to assess the accuracy of various relatively rapid means of stratifying a rural population in Bangladesh. The argument advanced is that this exercise was premature; and that little progress can be made towards improving the efficiency with which succeeding generations of fieldworkers conduct their enquiries, until more is known both about the way in which existing practitioners have divided their time between different activities, and about considerations behind these allocative decisions. As a modest step in this direction, the author offers an account of how he stratified a rural population in Bangladesh in the course of his own fieldwork and of why he proceeded as he did.