Page 9 - Mini-Module 10

The Five A’s

This is a The Five A’s

This is a staged approach to managing your time.

● Awareness:
The first stage asks you to consider what is really important to
you in both a personal and professional sense. It encourages
you to set concrete goals which reflect these factors. It also
asks you to consider other factors associated with how you
spend your time: your habits, behaviours, ways of
communicating and job responsibilities.

● Analysis:
If you are to improve your time usage you must look into the
details of how you presently spend your time, or risk wasting
it. By analyzing what you actually do, you can identify what
you need to alter to make better use of it.

● Attack:
An analysis of your time usage will undoubtedly expose many
things that waste your time. These ‘time thieves’ need to be
eliminated if you are to concentrate on the things that are
really important to you.

● Assignment:
While eliminating ‘time thieves’ you need to assign priorities
to the tasks you still have to do. This needs to be carried out
on a regular basis.

● Arrangement:
The final stage involves arranging your time in a purposeful
fashion: thinking about how to improve those ‘little’ skills on
a permanent basis so that you actually retain control of your
time. This requires some thoughtful planning.

Working through the five A’s, if applied correctly, can assist
considerably in the more productive utilization of available time.
We now look in detail at each of the five stages.

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