O Sweet Mr Math

wherein is detailed Matt's experiences as he tries to figure out what to do with his life. Right now, that means lots of thinking about math.

Tuesday, February 04, 2003

1:51 PM

I took a break from blog-related Web stuff on Friday to pay my monthly bills. While I was working on them, I had a variety of thoughts about my current unemployment and goals and what I need to focus on to get through this in a way that I'm happy about. Most of these are obvious, but they bear writing down anyway.

  • I'm on a tight budget now. No spending money on DVDs or Lego just because I want them.
  • I need to pay much closer attention to my checkbook balance than I have been.
  • The faster I can start making money, the less likely I am to have money problems.
  • I need a schedule. And a plan. And a planner, in which to record my schedule and plan. I think what I need to be doing is setting goals and deadlines, and then meeting them.
  • There are things I want to do and things I have to do, and they frequently aren't the same. Finding the proper balance between the two is the key.
  • I have trouble when the thing I think I "should" do next isn't something I'm particularly motivated to do. I'm likely to stall and not do anything, which is probably the worst possible response. Even doing something else that's not as high on my (virtual) to-do list is better than doing nothing at all. I need to get better at rewarding myself with stuff I want to do in exchange for completing things I need to do.

There were others, but it's now Tuesday, when I meant to write this up on Friday. I'm now facing what I think is my biggest fear: not procrastination itself, but the fear of procrastination. I ran into car trouble over the weekend, so I spent part of Monday working on the car and the rest napping. (It's fair to ask why I'm so tired. I don't think I'm getting that little sleep.) After the trouble I had Friday working myself up to actually pay the bills and my obvious avoidance behaviors today, I'm starting to feel demoralized. If I'm having this much trouble early on, how can I possibly expect to pull this off?

But that thinking's a trap. If I start worrying about whether or not I can do this, it will pull me away from thinking about actually doing it. The worries I should be having are not whether I can do it, but how I can do it. If I let myself get bogged down with the first question, I'm doomed. My problem is that I understand this on an intellectual level, but not an emotional level. So I let my fears control me, even though I know that it's my fears themselves that will cause what I fear to happen.

I'm fighting it. But it's hard.

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What does "rolls a hoover" mean, anyway?

"Roll a hoover" was coined by Christopher Locke, aka RageBoy (not worksafe). He enumerated some Hooverian Principles, but that might not be too helpful. My interpretation is that rolling a hoover means doing something that you know is stupid without any clear sense of what the outcome will be, just to see what will happen. In my case, I quit my job in an uncertain economy to try to start a business. I'm still not sure how that will work out.

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