The novel part of Checking Consequentialism is the ability to discriminate "consequentialist reasons" from "non-consequentialist reasons" - being able to distinguish that "Because a PhD gets me a 50% higher salary" talks about future positive consequences, while "Because I don't want my years of work to have been wasted" doesn't.

It's possible that asking "At what time does the consequence occur and how long does it last?" would be useful for distinguishing future-consequences from non-future-consequences - if you take a bad-thing like "I don't want my work to have been wasted" and ask "When does it occur, where does it occur, and how long does it last?", you will with luck notice the error.

"Intense, long, certain, speedy, fruitful, pure—
Such marks in pleasures and in pains endure.
— Jeremy Bentham's mnemonic for the signs of "consequentialist reasons"

EDIT: It occurs to me that I should explain this more. Bentham was trying to popularize consequentialism and remind his readers of what sorts of things count as consequentialist reasons to prefer a particular outcome. Eliezer suggests that we should ask about the closeness in time and the duration of a consequence. Bentham mentions these ("speedy" and "long") but also includes some others:

• Intensity — How great of a pleasure or benefit does this consequence bring?
• Certainty — How sure are we that it will actually happen? Is it a relatively sure thing, or just a chance at one?
• Fruitfulness — Will this pleasure be followed by others of the same kind, or will it exhaust itself?
• Purity — Is this a "pure pleasure" or a "mixed blessing"? What are the downsides; what's the catch?