How Much Reading Can Busy Professionals Fit in Each Day?

If you ask what the most prosperous professionals in the world attribute their success to, you’ll hear the same answer. Reading. Sounds easy enough, but when you look at your day, it’s hard to imagine getting a lot of reading done. Between rushing around from meeting to meeting, brainstorming with colleagues, and doing the day-to-day tasks of a professional, it feels nearly impossible to sit down and enjoy a good book. That’s a common misconception people have about reading. It’s not that you need to read an entire book in a day, but increase your reading speed to read articles, documents, and reports pertaining to your work. This way, you won’t feel so bogged down and strapped for time to complete all the other work you have on your plate.

Let’s take a closer look at how much time of your day you could spend reading helping you work towards becoming one of the most victorious professionals on the planet! 

Can you read more in a day?

Warren Buffet was once asked his secret to success and he replied, “Read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.” Everyone can do it, yes. However, one could challenge his statement about not many people taking his advice on reading more. Reading the newspaper, blog articles, or industry magazines can be as good as reading 500 pages of a novel. You just need to make the time for it. 

How much time can you set aside to read more?

We’ll have to do a bit of math to get a more realistic idea of what amount of reading you can fit in in a day. An average blog or newspaper article is roughly 500-words. The average reader can read about 250-words per minute. If you set a goal of reading 20 articles a day, it could take you up to 40 minutes to read all those articles. That’s something you can do during your lunch hour! You’ll be all caught up on the day-to-day happenings in your industry and impress your coworkers.

Reading a magazine is just as important as reading blogs or newspaper articles. Keep in mind that columns in a magazine are a bit more lengthy. Say each column is about 1,000 words and there are 20 columns. To read the entire magazine in a day will take you about 80 minutes. Now between reading blog articles and a magazine, you’ve set aside two hours of your day to reading.

Lastly, there are plenty of books to read! Whether they are for fun or another means to excel in your career, the average book length falls between 80,000 to 100,000 words. If you pick short books, you could potentially finish one in five hours. That doesn’t mean you need to read a book a day. Spread it out over the week, and you’ll tack on only a couple more minutes each day of reading.

The benefits of speed reading

Spending up to two and a half hours a day reading is definitely doable. Learning to read faster than the average person will help you get more reading in your day without overwhelming you or compromising your time. Speed reading trains you to focus better and comprehend more, both skills which you can use in all other aspects of your career. As an added bonus, speed reading improves your memory. 

Take a look at all of our courses today for more information and see how you can live up to the most brilliant minds in business.