How much time does it actually take to renew a passport?
My children are American citizens, and a passport application or renewal requires a scheduled appointment, multiple pages of printed forms with hand-written answers, and what feels like a devastating drain on emotional resilience, patience, good humor, common sense, and time-that-should-have-been-spent-doing-other-things.
The entire process demands MULTIPLE HOURS of your life, most of it spent waiting to engage, and then engaging with, the person who receives your forms, so much so that the time actually spent taking the photograph and filling out the form are rounding errors in the process.
Also, no one is keeping track of your passport expiration dates for you, but yourself. Miss the date with an urgent trip around the corner, and you’re scrambling for an expedited renewal that involves even more hoops.
On the other hand, last week I received a email from Singapore’s Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA), informing me that my passport was 9 months from expiration, and providing single sentence, three-step instructions with links on how to renew my passport. The links included information on passport photo requirements and the names of useful iPhone apps to facilitate taking a useable passport photograph.
So how long did it take me to renew my Singaporean passport?
Find something suitable to wear and put on make-up: 10 minutes
Download the passport photo app and get my husband to take a suitable photograph of me: 5 minutes (This part, admittedly, could have been an infinite amount of time, but I said to heck with it and settled for the second photograph.)
Log into the ICA website with my SingPass and put finishing touches on the 90% pre-filled passport renewal application form and pay: 1 minute (I actually timed it.)
It literally took me 1 minute to submit an application for the renewal of my Singaporean passport. The form was prefilled with all the information from my prior passport. All I needed to do was make a selection of where I wanted to pick up the passport, fill in my credit card information, and provide a local address and phone number so the consulate could reach me.
That was it. ONE MINUTE—most of it spent filling in credit card information for payment. After paying, I received a one page summary, letting me know when and how to collect my renewed passport.
Make the right thing to do the easy thing to do. I learned that years ago from one of my mentors, Dr. Bror Saxberg, and it’s the cornerstone of my approach to life, both personal and professional.
Simplify. Always simplify before scaling.
Reduce the hurdles so it’s brainlessly easy to do the right thing.
Make it so simple it’s impossible to screw up.
Operationally, it’s the heartbeat of an organization that is primed to effortlessly scale for growth.
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