I suspect all those old-sweats commenting how "it were all different in my day" had something like a 'pre-walk' list they mentally actioned? Or even something as tangible as a 'check-list' sellotaped to the cover of the book containing the auth-sheets? Maybe all the sky-gods on here were so sure they had completed all the necessary, they didn't bother with such trivia?
Perhaps that was why there were so many "I learnt about flying from that" stories in Air Clues in those days....
Back to the subject of the "outbrief" in modern times - the ones I saw/used were multi ones so not really applicable for the case in hand here. Wasn't there one included in the Flight Authoriser Course (FlaC) notes?