“The
following statistic might threaten you,” Trout writes, “but
today’s business managers are expected to read one million
words per week.” Let’s do some basic math here. I estimate that
we can comfortably read about 150 words per minute.
So, if you need to read one million
words, that would take you 6,666 minutes. That’s 111 hours, or almost
16 hours a day, seven days a week. And that’s reading non-stop,
without any coffee break!
So, that statistic couldn’t possibly be
right, could it? But even if you were supposed to read 250,000 words
per week, that still requires 4 intense hours of reading every day,
seven days a week. Now, I like reading, but reading for more than a
half hour tires me out.