Q:

Close voters call to arms: let's make this September welcoming

"It is September once again... and once again students are asking their homework problems..."
How about we help site newcomers learn to properly ask questions by spending few minutes in review queue and voting to close inappropriate ones more quickly. You can think of this as a kind of lightweight complement to various educational, welcoming, and mentoring initiatives that appear to be so popular of late.
Here are two queue filters that seem to be easiest to find and review troublesome questions: too broad and unclear. Of these two filters, the first one feels slightly more efficient to me, but I wouldn't bet on that - so I guess it's really up to you to pick.
For those having more time, another queue filter is probably most useful from the asker's perspective, because the custom close reasons tend to provide very accurate and easy-to-follow guidance: off-topic. I abstain from recommending it to everyone (nor do I frequently use it myself) because in my experiments it appeared to be noticeably slower than other filters listed above (and just in case if you wonder - no, I am not going to waste my time asking the dev team to fix that).
I am not going to load this suggestion with "success metrics", "progress indicators", "milestone definitions", and other stuff like that, because, per my recollection of a prior, somewhat similar effort, it didn't look particularly useful.
- If you just make a few short visits to the close vote queue for a couple of days, that would be cool.
At first I was going to end this suggestion with a lengthy explanation of how the timely closing of inappropriate questions is helpful to new users - both askers and answerers. It really is, and if I posted this a year or two ago, I would maybe provide a thorough explanation of why that is so, with proper reasoning, examples, and references to other meta discussions, etc.
But then I thought, no - today things are different and what I really want now is for us to somehow balance various misleading ideas and suggestions about the welcoming effort that seem to be spreading around lately. So be it.

As an optional supplement, a few productivity tips for those willing to participate:

Skip review when you doubt that the question is worth closing (there is no shame in that).
 
When I am particularly short on time I even fall back to blindly skipping all questions that are longer than 6-7 lines. I'm sure that this way I miss some close-worthy ones, but it speeds up things so much and, which is critically important, it keeps me certain about the votes I do cast, because I read and understand the question entirely. Even though there are other voters to keep things going right despite my occasional mistakes, I don't accept urgency as an excuse for wrong close votes.
Skip and avoid wasting time on questions that look like they are worth leaving open.
 
Proper decision on these tends to take more time and (most importantly) these are likely to expire off the queue and stay open without your involvement anyway. (if you think this also means that many close-worthy questions expire and stay open, keeping their askers unaware of the problem, well, it is indeed so).
If you fail an audit, try to slow down, or better yet, take a short rest.
 
I know there are slippery audits and I always manually correct the audited post if it feels wrong, so that it won't trick the next reviewer - no matter if I fail or pass. But when I fail, that is also always an indication that I am not in good enough shape and need to do something about myself to improve focus (or take a rest if I can't). I have done several tens of thousands of reviews, and treating audit failures as signs that I need to be more attentive has been extremely helpful.

A:

You're missing another important class of questions, which need to be closed. Duplicates!  Yes, many new questions are flagged as duplicates and they need to be reviewed as well (there were 58 posts flagged as duplicate in python yesterday). Troublesome questions that are too broad and unclear are certainly a problem as you mention, but duplicates are a problem too. 
If you have a gold hammer in a tag, then please review the duplicates questions in that badge. Don't let your gold hammer get corroded by leaving it in the open and doing nothing. Also, remember to hammer correct. With great power comes great responsibilities. 
Unlike the other review queues, which need 4 other reviewers to close, just one gold badge holder can complete a review by voting to close duplicates. 

A:

If you already have steward gold badge in the close review queue, you do not care much about review queue stats and you are disappointed with the close review queue because in many cases SE just age away your review time (too many questions, too few reviewers), its structure is inefficient and it is lacking the filters you would like. 
We (community members) have developed a bot, SOCVFinder that allows you to help out the peeps in the review queue avoiding that also their time in the queue is aged away.
With the bot, you can filter out questions on tag, number of close votes already present on question (review question with already 4cv that are aging away), score, no roomba (hence not reviewing questions that will be deleted anyway), no answers etc and you can open (load) all the questions contemporary in multiple tabs.
The bot, Queen is present in different chat rooms (since it also feeds possible duplicates to gold badge hammers) but its home is SOBotics chat. Feel free to drop in and run your own September batch.
If you are an RO in a chat room and like to have a duplicate feed or simply the possibility to run batches in the room, just let us know and we can make the bee enter.
Affiliation: I'm one of the developers of the bot and an RO of the SOBotics chat room.

A:

While we are sharing closing-productivity tips, here is mine: get the newest 100-200 questions with their close/up/down/vote counts, then filter and sort by some measure of "closability" to get a list of likely targets. A simple script does all this for me, and it is available as a web app: High-speed low-drag review.

