I Stopped Reading 50-Page Reports (Thanks to this AI Hack)

I get too many emails.

Like, genuinely too many.

Every week there's a new 50-page "industry report" someone thinks I should read. A Google Doc brief that's actually a novel. A Slack message that could have been a haiku.

A few months ago I hit a wall. I was spending more time reading about work than actually doing work.

So I stopped.

The TL;DR Revolution

I started summarizing everything.

Not manually—I'm not insane. I paste long documents into an AI summarizer and get the key points in thirty seconds.

Is this cheating? Maybe.

But here's the thing: most of those 50-page reports only have about 3 pages of useful information. The rest is padding, methodology, and executive summaries of the executive summaries.

Summarization isn't laziness. It's triage.

How It Actually Works

Most AI summarizers use something called "extractive summarization" or "abstractive summarization."

• Extractive: It pulls the most important sentences directly from the text. Like highlighting with a robot.
• Abstractive: It rewrites the content in shorter form. Like a human taking notes.

The best tools do a mix of both.

The Privacy Question (Important)

Some of you are dealing with confidential stuff. Client contracts. Internal memos. Medical records.

Before you paste anything into a web-based summarizer, check the privacy policy.

Some tools store your input. Some train their models on it.

The Axonix AI Text Summarizer runs client-side and doesn't store or transmit your data. That matters if you're summarizing anything you wouldn't post on Twitter.

My Workflow

Here's what I actually do:

1. I receive a long doc.
2. I copy the entire text.
3. I paste it into the summarizer.
4. I get 5-7 bullet points.
5. I decide if I need to read the full thing.

Most of the time? I don't.

Sometimes the summary reveals that the document is actually important, and then I read it properly. But now I'm reading with context. I know what to look for.

The Guilt Phase

I'll be honest: I felt weird about this at first.

It felt disrespectful to the person who wrote the doc.

But then I realized: no one reads long documents anyway. We skim. We ctrl+F. We scroll to the conclusion.

Summarization just makes the skimming honest.

When NOT to Summarize

Not everything should be summarized.

• Legal contracts? Read every word. Or pay a lawyer to.
• Creative writing? The "vibe" matters. You can't summarize a novel.
• Technical specs? If it's your job to implement them, read them.

But status updates? Industry newsletters? That 40-page Notion doc from marketing?

Summarize it. Get on with your life.

Pro Tip: Summarize Before Meetings

I also use this before meetings. If someone sends a 10-page pre-read, I summarize it in 30 seconds and walk in knowing the key points. I look prepared. I am prepared. I just didn't spend an hour getting there.

The tool is here. Try it on your next inbox avalanche.