Concept
Defaults
Defaults are the behaviours that run when no decision is made, and since most of daily life runs without a decision, they determine far more of what you do than your choices do.
Wendy Wood's research in Good Habits, Bad Habits shows how much of behaviour is executed on autopilot in a stable context, and Nir Eyal and James Clear draw the same practical conclusion: the way to change what you do is to change what happens by default. A default is the pre-set option, the thing on the table, the app that opens first, the route you take without thinking. Motivation is weather; defaults are infrastructure, and they are the only thing still working on your worst day. What people get wrong is fighting a bad default with daily willpower instead of changing the default once. One decision made in advance replaces hundreds made under pressure.
A real-life example
Every evening Tolga decides whether to cook or order in, and tired, he orders. He changes the default instead of the decision: a weekly delivery of three simple meal kits arrives on Monday. Cooking is now what happens when he does nothing, and ordering in becomes the choice that takes effort.
How to use it
- 1List the three moments each day where you decide the same thing again and again, and set a default for each.
- 2Make the good option the pre-set one: prepared, visible, already open.
- 3Change a default once, on a calm day; do not re-decide it on a tired one.