Every method eventually gets asked how long it takes. The more useful question is what a delay costs, because that number is calculable and the other one isn't.
The Base Case
Work with the published figures. Seven songs takes you to roughly 15% of everyday conversation. Seventeen takes you to 50%. Forty-seven to 85%.
Whatever pace you actually go at — listening in hours you already spend, no sessions added — the first seventeen songs take some length of time. Call it T. You do not need to know T for the rest of this to work.
So T from starting, you are covered for around half of ordinary conversation. That is the base case, and it is unremarkable.
What a Six-Month Delay Costs
Not just the delay itself. More, for two reasons.
The direct cost: you reach 50% coverage a delay later than you would have. Every interaction in between happens without it.
The second is that the conversion gets slightly more expensive, because the understanding you'd be converting degrades in the meantime. Not much across six months. Measurably across three years.
And there's a third cost, harder to quantify and the one that actually bites: six more months of the avoidance loop, which runs whether or not you're doing anything about it.
The Comparison People Don't Run
Consider two identical versions of yourself. One starts now, one starts next January.
Next January, version one is covered for 85% of ordinary conversation and has been having real exchanges for months. Version two is at zero, about to begin, in exactly the position you're in today.
The difference isn't talent, motivation or method. It's a start date — and it's the largest single variable in the whole thing.
Why This Argument Usually Fails
Because it's abstract, and abstract costs don't move anybody. Nothing bad happens on the day you don't start. No bill arrives.
Which is precisely why the delay extends indefinitely. The cost is real and entirely invisible, so there's never a day on which not starting feels like it cost something.
About Outputly
Outputly publishes coverage figures per album, so the arithmetic above is checkable rather than rhetorical. 15% at seven songs, 50% at seventeen, 85% at forty-seven.