How a change in a service affects your life and productivity

How a change in a service affects your life and productivity

Recently, Canada Post announced that it was going to stop delivering mail at home. The service will be available as PO boxes. So instead of picking up their mail directly into their mailbox, Canadians will have to go to their PO boxes to pick up their mail.

How does this change affect people?

I understand that Canada Post has profitability problems and must restructure. However, by making some simple calculations, we can see that this may represent a significant loss of productivity for many workers. Here’s a realistic and minimal  calculation of what this could mean for Canadians.

If you take 12 minutes a day to get your mail and that five days a week, that makes 60 minutes (or one hour) per week. Let’s say that you spend a two-week vacation outside, that’s 50 hours a year to get your mail.

50 hours per year is the equivalent of a workweek  of 40 hours with 10 hours of transportation. The above calculation is a very realistic figure to pick up his mail. It may be even more.

According to Canada Post, one-third of Canadians will transition to PO boxes. The two third of Canadians already receive their mail in PO boxes and nothing changes for these two third. This doesn’t represent a major change, but still important. We could think about people with reduced mobility and depending on the postman.

Possible solutions

Paying more for stamps could be a solution. However, Canada Post must have done a detailed evaluation of the possibilities. With emails, traditional mail has decreased significantly. The service is more likely to change. I trust Canada Post, but there could still be ways to help people to save time.

A solution that I see might be to tell us by SMS or email when we have mail in the PO box. If you’re at work, you could look at your PO box when returning from work only if you know that you have mail. This could save time and money. This could be the best compromise in terms of cost and efficiency. However, for people who receive mail every day, this is not a benefit because they will have to go check anyway.

What lessons should we learn from this?

We don’t often think about this kind of situation when we are employees. Managers are more likely to think about this kind of situation. Working for my business, this is the kind of thing I calculate more often.

The example of Canada Post is one example among many others. If you are self-employed and you are not able to have a week of vacation per year, this example can demonstrate how a few minutes in less or in extra can affect your holidays or leisure.