Corporate reading corners and curated libraries.

Take a break. Read a few pages.

Somewhere between the third video call and the fortieth notification of the morning, most of us reach for our phones and call it a break. We scroll and skim, and then we return to our desks feeling, our eyes never having left a screen, and our minds never left the noise.

Goldacht offered people something different. Over the past weeks, our team at Goldacht set up reading corners in four business centers across Vienna. These are places where freelancers, start-up founders, corporate teams and traveling professionals share lounges, kitchens and the same well-worn path to the coffee machine. We placed carefully chosen books in English and German and we invited people in with one simple line, on posters in the lounges and right next to the coffee machine, where everyone pauses anyway: Take a break. Read a few pages.

We asked for no commitment and offered no reading challenge or app to download. Brief, regular pauses help people recover energy and reduce fatigue, and the quality of the break matters as much as its length. Reading on paper slows us down in the best possible way.

“My mission is straightforward: I want to help people fall in love with reading again. The workplace is where most adults spend the majority of their waking hours, which makes it one of the most natural places to bring reading back into everyday life. The reading corners were the first step. We also curate small libraries for companies and choose books collections around a team’s languages, interests and culture,” says Mirela Vahdani, the founder of Goldacht.

If you work in a company, a coworking space or a business centre and you’d like your people to take better breaks, we’d love to talk. Contact us on hello@goldacht.com