Reading a long document: ask for pointers, never a summary

The task

Ravenscar Workwear's supplier manual runs to sixty-eight pages. Somewhere in it are the rules for marking cartons when a carton holds more than one size. Ghaly has read the manual twice, in April and last October, and she cannot remember, and the shipment loads in nine days.

Reading it end to end takes her 46.0 minutes. Marasem measured that: it is the desk's own figure for this manual, read for a specific answer rather than skimmed.

The route that looks obvious and is worse than reading

Paste the manual, ask for a summary of the carton-marking rules. Input 3.0 minutes, wait 1.5, three hundred words back.

Now check it. What is the check? There is only one. Read the manual and see whether the summary is complete and correct. That is 46.0 minutes on top of the 4.5 you have already spent, and you are worse off than if you had simply read it. Which you now have.

The alternative, practised everywhere, is not to check it. That is not a shortcut. It is a decision to act on an unverified claim about a document sitting on your own disk. It is also the decision most desks make, quietly, on the grounds that the summary read well.

The route that pays

Ask for pointers, not prose:

Find every place in this manual that bears on carton marking when a carton contains more than one size. For each one, give me the page, the heading it sits under, and the sentence itself, quoted exactly. Do not summarise, do not interpret, and do not merge two places into one entry.

Nine entries came back. Checking is now a different job. Open nine pages. Read nine short passages. Confirm each quotation is really there, and says what the entry claims it says. Ghaly logged 12.0 minutes for that, plus 0.5 for repairs, on an input of 3.0 and a wait of 1.5.

29.0 minutes a use, and the desk used it 26 times in six weeks: 754.0 minutes, 12.57 hours, USD 120.64. It is by a wide margin the most valuable thing on the log. Lesson 10 will show it was only the third most used.

It works because lesson 3's rule is doing its job. A summary is a claim about a document. A quotation with a page number is a claim you can disprove in eight seconds by opening the page. The pointer route does not produce a better answer. It produces an answer whose check ratio is 27.2% instead of 100.0%.

The one that cost real money, and it was a correct answer

Nine entries came back. The manual contained eleven.

The two it did not find sat in an annex, laid out as a table, under a heading that did not contain the words carton, marking or label. One of them set a different label format for cartons holding an assortment — a carton packed with more than one size. Nobody at Marasem knew it existed, because the answer had said nine, and nine had checked out.

640 of the 800 cartons on purchase order RO-9142 were assortment cartons. Ravenscar's own inspector found the wrong label on the second day of final inspection. Re-labelling cost USD 0.15 a carton in stickers and floor time: USD 96.00, and half a day of the loading window.

Set that beside the method's entire six-week saving of USD 120.64. A single use of a finder as a certifier ate 79.6% of everything the method had earned.

Nobody was careless. The nine pointers were all real, all correctly quoted, all correctly located. The failure is in the shape of the question, not in the answer. Find every place was read as there are nine places, and that is a claim the method cannot support.

You may act on what it found. You may never act on what it did not find.

A positive claim is cheap to check. Open the page. A negative claim — that a thing is absent — can only be checked by reading everything, which is the job you were avoiding. A missing pointer tells you about the search, not about the manual.

The other defect the check caught, which nothing else would have

One of the nine quotations was word-perfect and came from the wrong document. Ghaly had pasted a folder containing both the current manual and the previous revision, and the entry cited a page number that exists in both.

It was caught because checking a pointer means opening the page, and the page she opened did not match. Under the summary route it would have been invisible: a fluent paragraph, correctly reflecting a rule that Ravenscar withdrew last year.

What you paste is part of the answer. A stale source produces a perfectly correct quotation of a document nobody should be reading, and no amount of care in the instruction can detect it.

You are a careful reader with no opinions. Below is a document. I need to find every place in it that bears on one subject, and I am going to open and read each place myself, so your job is to locate rather than to explain. Subject: [WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW, IN THE WORDS THE DOCUMENT WOULD USE]. The same subject in the words my factory uses: [YOUR OWN VOCABULARY FOR IT]. Do the following. First, list every place in the document that bears on the subject in EITHER vocabulary. For each one give the page or section number, the heading it sits under, and the sentence itself quoted exactly and in full. Second, do not summarise, do not interpret, do not combine two places into one entry, and do not tell me what the rules mean taken together. Third, include anything that is laid out as a table, an annex or an appendix, and say when an entry comes from one. Fourth, at the end, list the headings you searched under and any part of the document you could not read. Fifth, state explicitly that this list is what you found and is not a claim that nothing else exists. Do not answer my question. Give me the places, and I will answer it. Document follows: [PASTE THE WHOLE DOCUMENT].