Photo: Spotify.com

In October of 2014, one month into my graduate program, I took on a gargantuan task: to listen to virtually every. single. Spotify playlist. that existed before I graduated from my program in late December 2015. (You can see the original post here, along with the name of every playlist I listened to, and comments where pertinent.) At the time, few people would have been able to identify the girl in the Spotify playlist photo. Now, most people of a certain age would be able to recognize her as Gigi Hadid, or at least be familiar with her face.

In November 2014, I realized I had to be more systematic about my quest, as Spotify had added a slew of playlists and I began to see no end in sight. By January of 2015, I had archived all the playlists to my account for easy tracking.

The numbers:

793 playlists, total (not counting those I stupidly listened to more than once)

I'd say each playlist probably averaged, on the low end and not including ads, about 5 hours. The vast majority of playlists fell in the range of just under 3 hours and a little over 6 hours. One was 59 minutes long and another was 59 hours and 35 minutes long.

That's about 3,965 hours or 237,900 minutes of listening (again, not including ads because I don't have Spotify Premium).

That's just over 165 straight days of listening.

So could I have completed the task in the 14 months I gave myself? Probably.

Would I have been able to get good grades and focus on my reading if I had? Probably not.

I am SO relieved to have completed this stupid task I set myself to, because now I can finally catch up on "new" music I've been wanting to check out. Like Khalid's "new" album, which came out just a little over 3 months ago. And the new Banks, the Julia Michaels EP, that Dermot Kennedy guy everyone keeps namedropping ...