I sometimes travel for work and pleasure, but also have packages shipped to my home without some sort of pre-notice of what they are or when they will arrive. For several years I have been subscribed to FedEx Insight to get notices of inbound packages. This is very nice as we could enter in many variations of our home address and people who would receive and get notices of this. It is often incomplete as shippers can block this visibility or it may come to yet another variation that we are unaware of.
UPS has finally launched a consumer-oriented version of this service they dub “My Choice”. One can sign-up online here and get notices when packages are inbound, usually the night before. What’s even better here is you can ask them to hold/delay delivery, and see what items may be signature required. They also give an estimated time of delivery based on the schedule and expected load of the drivers.
I’ve already come to love this capability as it can easily identify when a package is coming to our home. If you miss your driver, or have people ship items to you unexpectedly I strongly suggest you sign up for this service, as well as the FexEx variant. FedEx will call you to verify each addition, even if it’s just an address variant (eg: LN vs LANE).