Checking
The document you have no time to read
A report, a contract, a forty-page set of minutes that has been waiting a week.
How it goes
do it yourself- Ask first what it is about, in five lines, before any precise question.
- Then put your three real questions, the ones you would have opened it for, requiring an exact quotation in support of each answer.
- Go and check one quotation in the document. One is enough, and pick the one that suits you best.
What you get out of it
You know whether you need to read it, and which of the forty pages. The check teaches you the other half: how closely the answer tracks the document, and the point at which it starts extending it instead. Checking the quotation that suits you is what makes the exercise honest.