The Philosophers' Cocoon

In our January "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

I’m sometimes wondering whether my approach to reading papers is not critical and active enough, and I think that many weaknesses in other people’s positions slip my attention. I would be interested to hear about your approaches to reading critically. I’m most interested in how actively you engage with the literature, and whether you follow a more or less strict thought process (and if so, what is it?).

Here is what I usually end up doing when I read philosophy: I read a couple of papers that discuss a certain problem or position. But in doing so, I’m usually not following a certain thought process. For example, I usually wouldn’t reconstruct an argument, check its validity, and reflect carefully on each premise, without first having the intuition that it is fallacious, and I usually don’t actively try to come up with counterexamples to general claims that seem unsuspicious to me. Rather, I read until something strikes me as implausible or fallacious. That is, I wait for an intuition that a claim is false or an argument invalid. I’m sure that I would find more things to criticize if I were to read more actively. But on the other hand, this is extremely time-consuming, and the time I have for research is very limited. So, how do you read critically? Do you have tips on how to read more critically without wasting time?

For my part, I don't have a formula here. I just read and if anything pops out to me as implausible, inadequately defended, or invalid, then I'll stop and consider it more carefully. I also like to consider what foundational assumptions are generally accepted in a given literature (not just in this paper or that paper, but across a variety of papers) and ask whether I think they are good background assumptions. But, beyond this, I just read and let the critical part happen organically. 

What about you all? Do any of you have tips or particular strategies you find useful for critical reading?