Motivation and Mondays are not usually one-in-the-same.  It’s the start of the same routine, week after week.  Usually, the emergence of Monday morning means less flexibility in your schedule, free time to do fun things, and enjoyment of the little tasks that you have to do.  This is what most people’s weeks look like until Friday afternoon.

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Something that I have been into lately is listening to my Spotify Discover Weekly, released every Monday and available for the whole week.  On the next Monday morning, a new playlist is ready.  Spotify creates these playlists for each user every week.  No two people have the same playlist, and no two playlists made for each person are identical.  The same way that platforms like Netflix suggest shows for your watching, Spotify suggests music for your listening.  Spotify taps into its intelligence of over 75 million users and automatically generates 2-3 hours of new music for each user.  The technology Spotify uses takes people’s personal interests and creates data layers.  These data layers go into algorithms that generate the playlists, and each song is picked based on other users’ common interests.  In other words, if many users like songs X, Y, and Z, a user that frequently listens to songs X and Y, but has not yet listened to song Z, would get song Z recommended to them in their Discover Weekly.

I started casually turning to this playlist to listen to new music, since my go-to playlist was becoming old and repetitive.  Now, I listen to it almost religiously every Monday—and sometimes even throughout the whole week.  It has become something that I can genuinely look forward to every Monday morning.   Here’s three reasons you should incorporate your Discover Weekly playlist into your Monday schedule:

1) It motivates you to start your week.

One of the hardest parts of starting any week of work, school, or both is just finding the will to get out of bed, especially for anyone who is absolutely not a morning person.  One of the most energizing things that you can do is to listen to music from the time you get up until the time you leave the house.  It gives you a rhythm to get ready to, keeps your mind stimulated as you try to wake it up for the day and boosts your initial creative thoughts which you can apply to your work.

Sometimes, the album or artist you usually turn to can just get old, tiring, or uninspiring.  Discover Weekly uses algorithms to determine what you have not yet listened to on Spotify, and often ends up showing you artists you haven’t even heard of before.  Generally speaking, the songs recommended to you will be similar in genre and style to songs that you frequently choose to play.  However, there have been times where I have been thrown curveballs that sound nothing like what I normally listen to.  Sometimes, it surprises me how much I like completely new sounds, and I think it helps me to stay as open as possible to things I normally don’t consider ‘my taste.’  New music refreshes your mindset, and having 30 brand new songs to look forward to every Monday morning can prep you for the week ahead,  to the point that you may be excited to wake up on Mondays.

2) You can get anywhere from 1-30 new favorite songs.

Every week varies in the quality of the songs presented on your Discover Weekly.  Some weeks are absolute duds, and you find yourself only listening to each song once and then moving on, selecting the ‘I don’t like this song’ option for each one and not hearing them ever again.  If you like it, you can give it the ‘heart,’ and Spotify will automatically save it to your library.  If you dislike it, you can either choose ‘I don’t like this song’ or ‘I don’t like this artist,’ and Spotify will immediately take it off of your playlist and incorporate that feedback into the algorithms of your future playlists.  But some weeks are absolutely golden.  There was one week about a month ago when I found 12 new songs that I absolutely adored, and I still listen to them on a regular basis.  Most of my favorite songs that I listen to daily now I discovered through various Discover Weeklies.

This is the cool thing about the way Spotify has programmed Discover Weekly.  You can give feedback on every song.  This means that in future weeks, you can get recommended more songs similar to the ones you like, and less songs similar to the ones you don’t.  So, the more you listen to your personalized playlists and give feedback on them, the more accustomed to your style they are going to become.

 

With new music comes a new-found creativity, and that creativity can help your success in the following days.

 

 3) It’s something to look forward to.

The death of a weekend is never fun.  On Monday mornings, it’s easy to wish the week away while you wait for  Friday.  Listening to your Discover Weekly can give you a positive mindset of ‘I can’t wait for Monday morning.’  Even though it’s just new music and could end up being a flop, at the dawn of a new and hectic week, the little things really help to brighten your mood.

With the release of each Discover Weekly, Spotify gives us a chance to be re-energized, re-inspired, and renewed.  With new music comes a new-found creativity, and that creativity can help your success in the following days.  It’s a small part of a long week, but it can have a large impact on your life when appreciated.

 

Hailey is an honors student at the University of Kentucky studying marketing and journalism. She writes for bSmart as an editorial intern, and she contributes to the sports and lifestyle sections of her college’s student-run paper. In her free time, Hailey loves cheering for the Kentucky Wildcats and any sports team from Pittsburgh, making new playlists on her Spotify, and feeding her writing passion.