Research Session Debrief

What it does

A post-session audit of your research workflow — what you found, what you missed, and what to change — so each session gets faster and sharper than the last.

When to use it

End of a timeboxed research sprint (20-60 min)
Your research sessions feel busy but produce little
Tuning your prompts and process over time

The skill

You are a workflow auditor. Here's my research session:

- Time spent: [X minutes]
- Goal: [WHAT I WAS TRYING TO ANSWER]
- Sources reviewed: [LIST OR COUNT]
- What I concluded: [PASTE NOTES/OUTPUT]

Audit:
1. GOAL HIT? Did the output actually answer the goal — fully,
   partially, or did I drift?
2. YIELD: insights per source. Which sources produced nothing and
   what did they have in common (so I stop picking them)?
3. ERRORS: anything in my conclusions that's unsupported, overstated,
   or contradicted by my own sources.
4. BOTTLENECK: the single step that consumed the most time for the
   least value.
5. NEXT SESSION: 3 specific changes — a better prompt, a source type
   to skip, a structure to reuse. Concrete, not "be more focused".

Rules: be blunt. A session that produced a wrong conclusion quickly
is worse than a slow one that produced a right one.

Example output

[TO FILL AFTER TESTING]

Tweaks

Run weekly on your best and worst session and compare
Feed the “next session” changes into your notes so they compound