The problems with plans that never survive the doing. The process is flawed - not the plan.

How to eat a healthy breakfast for life.

For the last 3 years, my mornings have looked almost identical:

  • A couple of boiled eggs.

  • A can of sardines or salmon.

  • A banana.

  • Oranges, kiwis, or guavas.

If there’s dark chocolate and walnuts nearby, even better. If not, the basics still do the job.

Why this menu? 3 reasons.

I like it. It’s nutritionally balanced. And most importantly - it’s easy.

Yes, I enjoy an omelet or a salad every now and then.

But cooking like that every single morning? It wears thin fast.

So I designed an easy system instead. I boil a week’s worth of eggs in advance. No daily decisions. No morning friction.

Just eat.

When I coach clients on eating habits as a part of our lifestyle coaching, I don’t ask them to reinvent their lives. I apply a simple rule - change as little as possible while still moving toward the goal.

People will eat breakfast anyway. The work isn’t in convincing them to do it. The work is in making the right breakfast as easy as the wrong one.

And breakfast is just one example.

Most of your day is already a stack of behaviors you’ve made convenient. Change becomes nearly impossible if it feels heavier than those defaults. But when you design your environment so the new thing is just as easy, change isn’t an uphill battle anymore. It’s just the next step.

We’ve been told change is hard.

It doesn’t have to be. Change is hard only when we design it badly.

Same with learning: it drags on when it’s optional. We wonder why we can't learn anything, we look for some hacks.

But when you decide it’s important - you redesign your schedule, space, and priorities around it - it accelerates like crazy!

When we design for how humans are, not how computers are or AI is - surprisingly, things start to click.

I think, the problem is, why we default for this complex planning that has nothing in common with how we do things in reality is 2-fold:

  1. We do the planning with the system 2 thinking (the logical part of our brain) when the most doing depends on system 1 (the emotional, habitual, social and irrational self)

  2. Often, we don’t know a better way so we end up doing what we’ve done and what others do instead of re-imagining the process that might not work AND requires some good thinking.

So we end up doing the thing that we know won’t work (hoping that somehow it will) instead of designing the plan, that has a chance to survive with emotional, social, story-telling, give-me-easy-thing-first, want-it-now type of humans we are.


Over to you dear reader, where in your life do you fail to do the right thing because you never designed it for the way YOU actually work?

“It’s about coherence between a company’s physical environment and its psychological environment. If the ideas developed do not fit with their environment, there is no chance of success. Because the environment always outweighs occasional actions. The environment needs to transform alongside the desired behaviors if they are to be effective.”


PS: Out now - my Change Wired podcast episode with James Healy. We dig into his new book BS At Work: Why so much of modern work is bullshit and how behavioural science can make it better. You’ll see just how inhuman most design at work really is - and how behavioral science can flip how this story ends.