There should be a reading day!!

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read. -Mark Twain 

Organizations often arrange events like Fun-Friday, annual day, Business Unit meet etc. sometimes on working days and often on weekends. The idea is to let the people enjoy, give them creative breaks, relaxing experience, free their minds etc.

(I know I am using a lot of etceteras, but obviously there are more terms for such events than I know, so please bare with me and the few upcoming etceteras)

There are also events like coding competitions, coding challenges, Hackathons, bug-hunts etc. which intend to take the employees out of their day-today work, or sometimes make them work with competition in mind, to let them shape their own ideas etc.

I have a thought and a strong opinion about it!

why there shouldn't be a reading day? 

I am sure nowadays people do read a lot of blogs, e-books, kindle books etc. and share a lot as well, but I always have at least 10 articles or blogs that I have bookmarked and I postpone to read them in my leisure time which doesn't come easily!

So, to encourage reading (and not just to help finish the backlogs), I think there should be at least a day in the year, where all the employees would come to their work-place, but would only do the reading during the work-hours. They should be reading whatever they want, however they want! Of course people will discuss with colleagues, read in groups, exchange books, blogs, articles etc. but there should not be any coding, code reviews, testing, automation, stand-ups, management, business analysis, data analytics, presentations etc. and definitely no meetings.

It Should Be A Complete Reading DAY!!

This can also be put in different scales like, "one hour in a month", or "last 2 hours on last Friday of the month", "One day after you achieve a milestone" etc. but it SHOULD be experimented.

After the thought came to me, I pondered the cons of such a reading-day-event, but then again, I felt all the cons would equally apply to the above mentioned other events as well.

Not surprisingly, this thought was followed by a second thought to write a blog post, to gather the opinions of the reading world out here. So please let me know your comments, opinions!

Finally, let me put one of the many interesting quotes from the internet about reading!

Reading gives us Someplace to go when we have to stay where we are! 

Just between you and me, by quoting this quote I am not suggesting that reading day is a perfect alternative for team outings ;)