Ninety seconds that prevent most revisions

Revisions are unpaid work, and most of them are not disagreements about judgement. They are a question in the brief you did not answer, a name spelled wrong, or a heading left in from the last job.

The fix is a fixed check you run before every delivery, in the same order, without deciding each time whether this job needs it. Fixed checklists earn their reputation elsewhere: when eight hospitals adopted a 19-item surgical checklist, Haynes and colleagues (NEJM, 2009) recorded inpatient complications falling from 11.0% to 7.0%.

The five items

Reread the brief, then the deliverable, in that order. Not the other way round, because reading your own work first primes you to find the brief satisfying. Every question the buyer asked should be findable in what you are about to send. If one is only implicitly answered, answer it explicitly.

Check the specifics. Name, spelling, any figure, the count of things you said you would cover, the turnaround you promised. A buyer reads a misspelled name as evidence that the rest was careless too, and they are not entirely wrong to.

Check the format against what you sold. Length or duration inside the range you published, the headings you said there would be, the file type. A buyer promised a document who receives three chat messages has received something worse even if the words are identical, which is the argument for packaging a report they can keep.

Search for template residue. The previous buyer's name, a placeholder, a paragraph about an axis that does not apply here. This is the tax templates charge, which is why a template needs to be built to be edited rather than filled.

Read one paragraph aloud. It catches the sentence that ran away from you.

Why ninety seconds is the right budget

Long enough for the five items, short enough to do on a Friday evening with four jobs delivered.

A revision is the whole job's setup again for no fee, plus the delay, plus the small permanent dent of the buyer having had to ask. If the check prevents one revision in twenty jobs it has paid for itself several times over, and new earners run well above one in twenty.

It also changes what a revision request means. If you know the deliverable was checked, a request is information about the brief or the buyer rather than about your carelessness, and handling it is much easier when you are confident about what you sent.

What not to put in the check

Do not use it to improve the work. The check is verification, not a final pass, and the two get confused constantly. If you start rewriting at this stage you are outside your time box and you are also, on average, making the deliverable slightly worse.

Do not use it to reconsider your judgement either; the opinion formed with the material in front of you was better informed than this late doubt.

Then the handover

The check ends and the delivery message begins, and they are different jobs. What you say when you send it decides whether the review says anything specific, and the handover message is worth writing deliberately.

Buyers describe the same thing from their side: glowing reviews are almost always about a delivery that matched exactly what was asked for, and what commissioners write up afterwards is a short education in which details get noticed. If part of your deliverable is a score, check it against the scale you published rather than against feel, since an inconsistent scale is the one error a buyer can detect without knowing anything about the work. For recorded formats the check has one extra item, which is that the audio is listenable; the equipment notes elsewhere cover why that is the one piece of kit that matters.

Turnaround commitments are part of what you are checking against, and where a platform states them, Rate Cock's judge terms are the reference rather than your memory of them.

Run it identically every time; a check you adapt per job is a decision, and the decision is the part that fails at eleven at night.