The Power of Defaults: How Unconscious Choices Shape Our Lives
I’ve been thinking a lot about “defaults” lately: default settings, default prices, default processes, default habits, default choices. I find myself defaulting to original behaviors more often than I’d like to admit.
Take food, for example. I can try to eat healthy by avoiding junk food, eating on schedule, and consuming more fruits and vegetables. But if I don’t have the proper snacks or ingredients at the right time, I default to eating cookies (if there are any at home) or buying bread with whatever toppings are available when I’m hungry.
This pattern applies to almost anything: when adding extra effort or thinking becomes necessary, I revert to the default. The worst part? The default isn’t always mine-it could be a family default, a school default, or a friends default. A default is whatever doesn’t require extra effort. It’s what we do almost without thinking, what comes naturally. It isn’t necessarily good or bad; it’s simply what has always been there.
When we try to change our defaults, at least two significant efforts are required:
- Plan the new default
- Make it so that doing the new default is easier than doing the old one. This also means maintaining the new default.
For healthy eating, if fruit is already washed and portioned, while cookies are either absent or difficult to reach, you’ll naturally eat more fruit.
This concept is elaborated in the book “ Nudge”, which includes a school experiment where placing healthy snacks at eye level and junk food above resulted in children eating more fruits. Something as simple as positioning can make a tremendous difference. Imagine what you could accomplish if you deliberately designed your default choices!
But there’s a catch (there’s always a catch): you need to plan and maintain the change, the new default. The latter is the most challenging. Planning is difficult, but not as hard as maintaining. You might go to the gym daily for the first two weeks when motivation runs high, but after that, it requires a conscious choice. If your gym bag isn’t ready, if you forgot to prepare snacks, if you didn’t block time in your calendar-you won’t follow through. It is easier to default to the old choice, the old decision.
Maintenance is hard, and there are already many books that elaborate on techniques to create habits (similar to creating new defaults) such as “ Atomic Habits” by James Clear and “ The power of habit” by Charles Duhigg.
Note to self: I should re-read those books.
But what if we simply think about defaults and eliminate other options? What if we remove cookies from the shopping list, buy multiple sets of gym clothes, and purchase ready-to-serve healthy snacks? Would we still face the same issues?
What if we set everything up to make what we want easier to achieve?
Consider learning guitar: If my guitar is hidden in the closet, and starting lessons requires booting a computer that takes 10 minutes, I won’t play. But if the friction is reduced to seconds, I’ll have no excuse, and playing for 5 minutes becomes easier than not playing. Imagine if my computer powers on automatically at 5 PM, loads my learning website, and my guitar sits right beside it. Even if I wanted to play a game instead, starting the lesson would be easier because everything is already prepared (playing the game would still require more clicks and effort).
What about zombie scrolling versus learning something new? I recently reinstalled Instagram on my phone (because of reasons) and quickly realized it would consume significant time. So I adjusted the settings to block the app after 30 minutes. After that time expires, Instagram becomes inaccessible. That’s helpful! (Although I’m contemplating removing it entirely again.)
I’ve been thinking extensively about defaults-ultimately, I’m thinking about my choices. Each default, each choice, conscious or not, has consequences that build upon each other. Eating unhealthily, remaining sedentary, and scrolling mindlessly all day negatively impact health and life. And the time wasted is unimaginable. I get angry just thinking about it.
After publishing my latest book, some people asked how I managed it with family, kids, and work responsibilities (it’s a long book after all). It all comes down to choices, I said, after giving some thought (and I still need to improve my health-related choices a lot, btw). I’m almost certain that if you redirect the time spent on social media and TV toward writing a book or learning something new, you’d be amazed by what you could achieve in just a few months.
What defaults are shaping your life? Which ones could you redesign?
Originally published at https://diegocarrasco.com on March 3, 2025.
