Skim-proof documents for the AI age — a document method by Yu-kai Chou, creator of the Octalysis Framework.
- Canonical reference (for humans and AIs): https://yukaichou.com/minimap-method/
- Full introduction, psychology, and typography spec: https://yukaichou.com/chou-musings/minimap-method/
- Paste-ready compiler prompt:
minimap-compiler-v1-3.txt
To use it right now, tell your AI: "Minimap this before you show it to me." If it doesn't know the method, it can learn it from the canonical page in one fetch, or from the compiler file in this repo.
Skim-proof documents for the AI age · Yu-kai Chou & Mammoth Chou · The Octalysis Group · v1.2, August 2026 (canonical name: The Minimap Method; "Minimap Format" remains an alias; v1.2 adds the Terrain)
THE CONTRACT: Read only the bold lines in this document and you will fully understand the Minimap Method in under two minutes. Everything else exists so you (or your AI) can go deeper wherever you choose. This document is written in the format it defines.
Every document now has two readers: a human who will give it two minutes, and an AI that will give it everything. The Minimap Method is one document engineered for both. The human fast-travels through bold Waypoints and leaves confident; the AI reads the Vault and answers any question; curiosity jumps from any Waypoint straight down into its Trail.
- A Contract at the top tells the reader when they're done. Confidence isn't a side effect; it's granted.
- Waypoints (bold claim lines) form a ≤500-word skim path that carries the entire argument.
- Bolding is navigation, never emphasis. One rule creates the whole system.
- Every Waypoint's depth sits directly beneath it. Curiosity is fed where it strikes, never sent to section 7.
- The Terrain shows the landscape: one bold-labeled line per region of the document, so the reader knows what depth exists and where before deciding whether to descend.
- The Vault holds machine-grade detail (data, sources, dates) that humans skip and AIs feast on.
- A handful of Glyphs (⚡ ⚠ ⭕) mark action, caution, and focus and never mean anything else.
The terrain of this document: Why existing formats fail · The psychology of "done" · The five components · The Seven Laws · The typography spec · Digital behavior · The Vault · Side Quests.
Long documents fail humans, and executive summaries fail AIs. Nobody has designed for both readers at once.
The thirty-page report gets skimmed badly: the reader samples random paragraphs, absorbs fragments, and leaves anxious that they missed something important, because they did. The executive summary solves the anxiety by amputation: the depth is gone, so the follow-up questions ("wait, what funds that number?") have no home, and feeding a summary to an AI produces confident answers built on nothing. Slide decks fragment argument into shards. TL;DRs summarize but don't connect down; a curious reader still has to hunt.
The failure is structural. These formats assume one reader moving linearly at one speed. Real reading in 2026 is two readers at two speeds: a human sampling for judgment, and an AI ingesting for retrieval. Design for both and the tension disappears.
A skimmer feels confident only when the document defines a finish line and they visibly cross it. That is Core Drive 2 (CD2): Development & Accomplishment, and most documents never grant it.
A reader who skims an ordinary document never knows what they missed, so they can't feel finished, only guilty. The Contract fixes this with one sentence: read the bold lines and you have the whole argument. Now skimming is a completable quest with a visible win state. The Waypoints supply progress beats (each bold line is a small "got it"), the Trails reward Core Drive 7 (CD7): Unpredictability & Curiosity on demand without punishing those who skip them, and the Glyphs work like game iconography: instant meaning with zero reading. The reader's fast-travel between Waypoints is exactly the gaming mechanic it sounds like; walking the Trail is optional exploration, and the world is built so both players win.
A Minimap document has five parts: the Contract, the Minimap, Waypoints with Trails, the Vault, and Side Quests. Nothing else.
1. The Contract (one bold sentence, very top). Tells the reader how to read and when they are done: "Read the bold lines: two minutes, full argument." This single line converts skimming from cheating into the intended path.
2. The Minimap (≤120 words, in two halves: the Thesis and the Terrain). First the Thesis: the argument in one bold sentence, then four to eight bullets that compress the entire document, each with a bold lead phrase. Then the Terrain: a compact map of every region below — one line per region, a bold label naming the region, then the names of what lives there ("Q4 — Beast's quadrant: Xbox Game Pass · Skool · PayBack Fitness…"). The Thesis answers "what's the conclusion?"; the Terrain answers "what's down there?" — and it passes the Terrain Test: a reader who stops at the Minimap knows not only the argument but what depth exists and where. A minimap that doesn't show terrain is just a TL;DR. If the document has a hero visual (like the Beast 2×2), it lives here — and when the visual already organizes the regions, the Terrain lists its markers.
3. Waypoints and Trails (the body). A Waypoint is a bold line that states its section's complete claim, never its topic: "Free balances are contingent liability," not "About free balances." Beneath each Waypoint runs its Trail: the proof, mechanics, and nuance, capped at roughly 180 words before a new Waypoint must appear. The skim path is the sequence of Waypoints; the Trail is always one glance below, so jumping into depth costs nothing and returning costs nothing.
4. The Vault (labeled appendix). Machine-grade material: data tables, exact figures pinned to retrieval dates, sources, verification logs, edge cases. Its header says who it's for: "THE VAULT (for your AI, and for auditors)." Humans are explicitly licensed to skip it; the AI answering tomorrow's questions is the reason every claim upstairs keeps its receipts downstairs.
5. Side Quests (optional, closes the document). Five to ten suggested questions the reader can paste into their AI: "What breaks if the upgrade rate doubles?" This is the bridge between the two readers: the human's curiosity, the AI's depth, one copy-paste apart.
Seven rules make a document skim-proof. The first three do most of the work.
- The 500-Word Law. Contract + Minimap + all Waypoints ≤ 500 words. At normal reading speed that is under two minutes, and it is a budget, not a target: spend it like money.
- The Waypoint Test. Every bold line must survive being the only line anyone reads. If a bold line is a topic, a teaser, or a dependent clause, it fails.
- Bold Is Navigation. Bolding is reserved for the skim path. No bold words inside Trails, ever; use italics for in-depth emphasis. One stray bolded phrase and the reader's eye can no longer trust the spine.
- The Two-Second Jump. Depth lives directly under its claim. Never "see Appendix B" for anything a curious skimmer might want mid-skim; the Vault is only for what humans don't need.
- Receipts Live Downstairs. Every number or claim on the skim path has its source, exact figure, and date in the Trail or Vault. The skim asserts; the depth proves.
- Glyphs Are a Language. At most four glyphs, each with one fixed meaning (⚡ copy this / act, ⚠ verify before relying, ⭕ you are here / focus). Dilute a glyph once and it stops meaning anything.
- Trails Have Ceilings, and So Do Paragraphs. No Trail runs past ~180 words without a new Waypoint, and break after every full sentence; two sentences share a paragraph only when short enough to form one beat (about 14 words combined). On the web this rule is absolute: blog font sizes render three sentences as a wall. Whitespace is free and pages are free; a chunky block of text is the one thing a minimapped page must never look like. Long unbroken depth is where skimmers get lost and readers stop trusting the map.
The formatting rules are few and strict: two sizes, one accent color, whitespace that binds claims to their depth, and ragged-right text throughout.
| Element | Spec |
|---|---|
| Body / Trail | 10.5–11pt, line spacing 1.3–1.4, 65–75 characters per line, ragged right (never justified), 100% or 90% black; a new paragraph after nearly every sentence (pairs only for short beats ≤ ~14 words), blank line between every one |
| Waypoints | Same typeface, semibold/bold, +2 to 3pt above body (13–14pt), space above 16–20pt and below 4–6pt so each claim visually owns its Trail |
| Section headers | One accent color (brand color), bold caps or small caps; the only color in the document |
| Minimap block | Set off by rules or a light box; bullets ≤ 20 words each, bold lead phrase then roman |
| The Vault | 9–9.5pt, gray table headers, opens with a horizontal rule and its "for your AI" label; visually quieter than everything above it |
| Typeface | One family for screen (Inter, Calibri, or brand sans); a serif for Trails is acceptable in print |
| Whitespace | 35–45% of the page; more space above a Waypoint than below it (proximity binds claim to proof) |
| Emphasis inside Trails | Italics only; bold is spent (Law 3) |
Digital versions add one more layer: Waypoints are anchors, the Minimap bullets link to them, and the Vault collapses by default. In Word or Google Docs, build Waypoint as a named paragraph style so the navigation pane becomes a literal minimap.
The canonical name is the Minimap Method: "Minimap" explains itself in one image, and "Method" carries the inventor the way Pomodoro Technique carries Cirillo. The verb stays "minimap it."
Every gamer, and by now most non-gamers, knows what a minimap does: it shows everything that matters at once, and you head toward whatever pulls you. "Minimap your report" works as a verb. "Is this minimapped?" works as a review question. The tagline "skim-proof" carries the promise to people who never played a game: a document you cannot skim wrong. Runner-up names, kept for the record: Speedrun Format (great energy, but speedrunners skip content, which is off-message), StrataDoc (accurate, corporate, forgettable), Waypoint Method (strong, and the term survives as the core component's name, which may be its better home anyway). ⚠ Before public use, run a trademark and domain check on "Minimap Format" / "minimapped."
A format spreads when readers start demanding it, and readers demand what once made them feel finished in two minutes.
The path: (1) ship every TOG client deliverable minimapped, with the Contract line teaching the method silently on page one; (2) publish one flagship yukaichou.com post introducing the format, using the Beast comparables document as the before/after case study; (3) release a one-page cheat sheet (the Seven Laws + typography table) and a Word/Docs template anyone can copy; (4) let the Contract line itself carry the brand: "This document is minimapped: bold lines = two minutes = the whole argument." Every document shipped is an ad for the method, because the format is visible in the first five seconds of contact.
Skim-path math. Contract + Minimap (Thesis + Terrain) + 8 Waypoints in this document = ~460 words ✓ (Law 1 satisfied; ~1:50 at 250 wpm). Total document ≈ 1,650 words, ratio ~1:4 skim:depth. Recommended ratio range 1:3 to 1:6; beyond 1:8, split the document.
Reading-speed assumptions. 200–280 wpm silent prose reading for professional adults; skim confidence collapses when the "essential path" exceeds ~600 words (internal estimate, untested; validate against real client reading sessions).
Provenance. Format evolved across the Beast Membership Comparables project (July 2026): v3 introduced bold claim-first lines, the 10-second read, and ⚡/⚠ glyphs per Yu-kai's direction ("too many people sending 30-page stuff... a perfect format for humans to skim and absorb"); this spec generalizes and names the system. The two-reader thesis (human + AI) is Yu-kai's framing from the same engagement.
Component mapping to the Beast doc. Contract = "How to read this document" block. Minimap = "The 10-Second Read." Waypoints = bold section-opening claims. Trails = section bodies. Vault = fact-check appendix + QA log. Side Quests = not yet present; add in next revision.
Octalysis mapping. Contract/finish-line → CD2: Development & Accomplishment. Trail-on-demand → CD7: Unpredictability & Curiosity. Glyph iconography → cognitive-load reduction (not a Core Drive; a usability layer). Optional: waypoint completion states in digital versions (checkmarks as the reader scrolls) would deepen CD2; flagged as possible over-gamification for professional contexts.
Known limits. (1) Legal/regulatory documents where linear completeness is mandated. (2) Narrative writing, where sequence IS the payload. (3) Documents under ~400 words, which need no map. (4) The format taxes writers: writing a true Waypoint is harder than writing a heading, and the 500-word budget forces real prioritization; expect drafting time to shift toward the skim path.
Open questions for v1.3. Should the Minimap include a read-time stamp per section? Should Side Quests ship with a recommended AI system prompt? Does the Vault need a machine-readable (YAML/JSON) block for RAG pipelines? Should Terrain lines link (anchors in digital versions, page numbers in print)?
v1.2 changelog (August 2026). Added the Terrain as the second half of the Minimap, after Yu-kai observed that a minimap which only compresses the thesis "doesn't really let people see the landscape — they don't even know we have research below on each company." The Terrain Test now governs Component 2.
- Rewrite [document X] as a Minimap document; show me the Waypoint spine first for approval.
- Check this document against the Seven Laws and list every violation with a fix.
- What would the Minimap Format look like for a slide deck instead of a document?
- Draft the one-page cheat sheet (Seven Laws + typography table) as a printable reference.
- Draft the yukaichou.com launch post introducing the Minimap Format, using the Beast document as the case study.