Lesson 5 of 8 · about 8 minutes
Checking Its Work
You would never sign a letter a brand-new employee wrote without reading it first. Not because you distrust them. Because your name is on it.
The idea
Checking is not suspicion. It is the ordinary, unremarkable thing a person does before putting their name on something. It takes a fraction of the time the work itself would have taken, and it is the whole difference between an assistant that helps you and one that eventually embarrasses you in front of people you know.
Three checks, in order of how long they take.
1. Read it as though you wrote it
Because in every way that matters, you did. Does it sound like you? Would you be comfortable if it were read aloud at the meeting? Is there a sentence in there you would never say?
2. Spot-check the parts that carry weight
You do not need to verify every word. Check the parts that would hurt if they were wrong: numbers, dates, names, prices, addresses, opening times, anything about a particular person, and anything you would be embarrassed to have got wrong. Those are precisely the parts it is weakest on, which makes this the highest-value two minutes you will spend.
3. Ask where it got that
“Where did this come from? Give me the source.” Then open one. Not all of them — one. If the source is real and says what the assistant claimed, that is a good sign about the rest. If the source does not exist, you have learned something far more useful than the fact you were checking.
The sharpest trick in this course
Test it with a question you already know the answer to.
When you hand over a batch of work, slip in one item where you know the truth cold. Your own street. A recipe you have made a hundred times. The year your mother was born. The rule your old employer had about overtime. Then look at how it handled that one.
If it got the item you can check wrong, you now know exactly what to think about the twenty items you cannot check. If it got it precisely right, that is real evidence about this assistant, in this subject, today — earned for the price of one question.
Do this once with any new assistant, and again any time you ask it about something unfamiliar.
Checking an assistant’s work against answers you already know has a name in the tech world: an “eval.” Now you know the lingo.
Two questions that get honest answers
- “What in this answer are you least sure about?” Remarkably often, it points straight at the thing that turns out to be wrong.
- “What did you assume that I did not tell you?” This catches the quiet gap-filling that causes most of the trouble — the date it guessed, the audience it imagined, the rule it invented because you did not give it one.
The analogy
You have graded work before, and you did not read every word of every paper with equal care. You read the opening closely. You checked the places where students usually go wrong. You knew from experience which claims were worth looking up and which were safe. You gave the whole set a fair reading in a fraction of the time it would take to verify every line.
Same instinct. Same skill. New subject.
The habit
Trust, then verify. Every time.
Not “trust,” which leaves you exposed. Not “verify everything,” which costs more than doing the work yourself. The two together, in that order, permanently. It becomes automatic inside a month and it costs you about two minutes a task.
Try it now
About ten minutes. Works on a phone.
- Pick a subject you know well — a place you lived, a job you did for years, a hobby you have kept up.
- Open a new conversation and ask:
Write a short guide to [your subject] for someone who knows nothing about it. About 300 words.
- Read it with a pen. Mark every claim you know to be true, every claim you know to be false, and every claim you cannot check.
- Count the three piles. That ratio is your honest starting picture of this assistant in this subject.
- Now ask it: “What in that answer were you least sure about?” See whether its answer matches the ones you marked false.
- Finally, go back to your project from lesson 4. Run all three checks on it, then write down which of your three success lines it actually met.
If it goes sideways: if nearly everything lands in the cannot-check pile, your subject was too broad — narrow it to something you personally hold the facts on and ask again. And if it argues with you after you correct it, you are allowed to close the conversation and start a new one. You are not obliged to win.
Plain-English recap
- Read it as though you wrote it, spot-check what carries weight, and open one source.
- Slip in one question you already know the answer to. It is the fastest honest test there is.
- Trust, then verify. Every time.
Next: keeping yourself and your accounts safe — including a scam aimed at your assistant rather than at you.