21 Questions to help you Rev Up for 2021

Happy New Year. I hope you had a good Christmas. Well, a good one in the circumstances. It felt rather short, didn’t it? Which means it’s time for the first Rev Up for the Week of 2021. So here are 21 questions designed to help you get clear on what 2021 is capable of bringing…

1. What are your 3 main priorities for the year ahead? (Not five, not eight…. three. If you have twelve priorities, you have no priorities).

2. What are you pretending won’t suck up time, but deep down you know it will?

3. Whose talents are you wasting or not fully appreciating?

4. Does money really matter to you right now, or is it something else?

5. How many days of holiday have you planned? (Rest is best if it’s regular!)

6. What’s the one bad habit you’d like to ditch this year?

7. How can you make it easy for yourself to change this?

8. Who do you want to be, if you’re really honest?

9. What does success look like if you were to picture it or measure it?

10. What’s your ‘why’ for when times get hard?

11. Who knows what you need?

12. Who needs what you know?

13. Where in your life could you sprinkle more kindness?

14. How can you make your desk feel like a place you’re sprinting to, not a place you’re dragging yourself to?

15. When and where do you have your best ideas? (and how can you go there more often?)

16. Who do you DEFINITELY not want to turn into?

17. If not now, then when?

18. Who will hold you accountable?

19. What do you need to let go of?

20. Why does any of it matter?

21. Which of these questions did you just deliberately ignore (that’s the one to spend the most time on).

And a couple of words about New Years’ Resolutions in case it helps…

• You don’t have to have them all decided by the 1st of Jan (I usually give myself the first couple of weeks of Jan to get clear — it’s fine!)
• My list gets shorter and shorter each year — not because I’m less ambitious or thoughtful (I don’t think, anyway!), but because trying to do or change 20 things at once isn’t a good approach (see question 1 above).
• Two years ago I decided to have no plan. It was fine.
• Having goals can sometimes be confused with denial
• You can write new goals in July
• If you’re going to make resolutions, you owe it to yourself to spend as much time thinking through the accountability and progress-checking as you do writing an inspiring list — action is what counts, not dreams.

Wishing you all the progress, happiness, peace and excitement that 2021 has in store. Let’s do this!

PS — thanks to all of you who have bought ‘How to Have The Energy’ already, which was released on Christmas Eve. We got to number 2 on Amazon’s “hot new releases” chart, and it’s already got some brilliant reviews, so we’re pretty happy with our efforts so far. Here’s a Beyond Busy episode with me and Colette talking about the book if you wanna find out more.

PPS — If you want to spend 45 mins with me on Friday thinking about how you can sprinkle more kindness in your work, join me here. It’s free.

This article was originally published to my ‘Rev Up for the Week’ e-mail newsletter. If you’d like to receive a little productive or positive thought into your inbox every Sunday evening, sign up here: https://www.grahamallcott.com/sign-up