DEFAULT

Make the preferred path happen without a repeated choice, while keeping an honest opt-out.

Lunchtime at work is a daily ambush. By noon you are depleted, the sandwich shop is downstairs, and the salad you meant to eat required a decision at 7 a.m. that nobody was there to make. You do not have a nutrition problem so much as an architecture problem: the worse option is the automatic one, and the better option requires daily heroics.

Default means making the preferred path happen without a repeated choice, while keeping an honest opt-out. The cue is a recurring decision you keep making wrong under pressure despite knowing your own preference in calm moments. The operation: decide once, in the calm, what the ordinary case should be. Then arrange it to occur without further decisions, such as prepping five lunches Sunday so the prepared meal is simply what exists at noon. Preserve the exit, since a default is not a cage; you can still join the team at the sandwich shop by choosing to. When it works, your good outcome stops depending on your worst-timed willpower, and eating well becomes what happens when you do nothing. The spec's warnings: defaults must fit the person, since defaulting everyone to high-intensity exercise ignores injury and readiness, and a default that exploits inattention rather than expressing informed preference is manipulation wearing convenience's clothes.