[Day 3 of the four unlocks series. So far: the thinking partner. Today, the reading problem.]

A portfolio manager I work with had a stack of fund documents on her desk, each one 90-plus pages. The terms she actually needed (redemption windows, gates, notice periods) live on maybe six of those pages, scattered, in language written to be skimmed past. Her old process was an afternoon per document. And some documents simply didn’t get read; she’d rely on someone else’s summary and hope.

Now she uploads the document and asks for the terms that matter, each one with the exact language quoted and the page it appears on. Then she checks three of the citations against the original. If those hold, she trusts the extraction and spends her afternoon on the decision instead of the retrieval.

AI will occasionally invent a quote rather than admit it couldn’t find what you asked for. This is the fine print on the whole unlock. The fix costs you two sentences in the prompt (require exact quotes with locations, and require “I’m not sure” when it’s not sure) plus two minutes of checking. Skip the check and you’re trusting instead of verifying.

For your whole career, what you could read set a ceiling on what you could decide well. Meeting prep meant choosing what to skim. Due diligence meant sampling. That ceiling just moved.

What it looks like in a normal week: the competitor’s earnings transcript before your strategy meeting. Six months of customer feedback before you touch the roadmap. The vendor contract you’d have renewed on autopilot. Work that used to mean “block off Thursday” now happens before your next meeting.

The prompt I use walks a document in a specific order: what it commits you to, the numbers with their locations, what’s unusual, what’s missing, and the three questions to ask the other side. Grab it here: Document Decoder prompt template.

The judgment is still yours. But you stop rationing your reading, and it’s worth watching what that changes about what you’re willing to look into.

Alex

PS Tomorrow: the unlock nobody admits they need. It involves a question a managing partner once asked me during a coffee break, quietly.

PPS If you're questioning how I suggest people approach reading and learning after reading this post, also read this past post and this study on Your Brain on an LLM: AI should not replace actually reading!