By Steven Cooley, Customer Impact Scheduler

If you’re not new to mystery shopping, you’re probably already familiar with how schedulers and editors work together through the process of mystery shopping. But what do we do outside of work? Though it may sound hard to believe, when we aren’t in the office, we’re regular people with normal interests and hobbies.

One of my biggest hobbies is reading. I’ve loved to read since I was a kid, and I usually make it through a handful of books in a year. Recently my “list of books I want to read” has been getting longer, and I have had less and less time to actually read any of them. Life gets in the way – work, friends, and relationships – they all tend to pile up, and the free time I used to be able to spend reading is suddenly replaced with other obligations.

BooksIn an effort to combat this, I decided that in 2015 I wanted to complete a reading challenge of some kind. I scoured the web looking for the perfect way to encourage myself to make time for the books I love, and when I failed to find an existing challenge that I liked, I created my own!

The reading challenge works like this – On this page you’ll find a poster I created that includes 64 categories of books. The book categories are things like “A book with a blue cover” or “A book written in 2014.” If I read a book with a blue cover, I get to check off that category, and books can even count for more than one category (up to 4 per book). If I’m successful, by the end of the year, I will have read at least 16 new books!

I shared the challenge with my co-workers at Customer Impact and some of my other friends, and several of us are competing to finish the challenge. There aren’t any prizes, we’re just doing it for fun, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any benefits. According to [some researchers], reading can reduce stress, improve your brain function, and even help fight Alzheimer’s disease.

If you want to play, all you have to do is download the poster and start reading. Feel free to comment and let us know how far along you are!

 

 

Featured Image by: FreeDigitalPhotos