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The Five A’s: A Scheme for Managing Time Better

Proponents of effective time make some fairly major claims, such as that it can: simplify your life;
reduce stress; increase effectiveness; increase efficiency; increase job satisfaction; increase personal
and organizational productivity; and create more ‘personal time’ for you to use. The bottom line of
these is that time saved through thoughtful time management can be used for working on what is
really important for your school and for increasing time for you and your family. But before any
benefit can accrue the issue of how time is used must be carefully examined. One approach to doing
this is through considering a scheme called the Five A’s of time management.

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. The key here is working out what
you value.
 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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