I can't turn it off.
Treating life like a design problem starts with one question: who designed this default, and for whose benefit?
Most things in modern life aren't neutral. The first four products in a search result are paid placements. Paper cups at tea stalls have a plastic lining most people don't know about. Palm oil shows up in things that don't need it because it's cheaper and makes food more addictive. You're not choosing these things. You're accepting someone else's optimization.
Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
We eat two meals a day. We cook almost everything at home — not because we're disciplined, but because it removes a hundred decisions I don't want to make. Ginger, garlic, tomato blended and frozen into ice cube trays. Radish and carrot sitting in water in the fridge. Green chillies with the heads removed before storing or they rot faster. Multigrain atta from a mill nearby — freshly ground, no preservatives, ₹20 cheaper per kilo. We cut outside eating by about 90%, not out of some health goal, but because once you understand what's in most processed food, the default stops making sense.
This is what systems thinking does when you apply it to daily life. You stop accepting things as given and start asking what they're optimized for. Then you run your own experiment. Then you measure and adjust.
Morning: brooming, cooking, pooja. Then one big thing. Not three. Not a full list. One. The rest is secondary. I've tried running full task lists. They create the feeling of productivity and not the thing itself.
AI makes this research faster now. But the same rule applies — question those answers too. Big companies fund misleading research. Models inherit the biases of their training data. The tool is useful. The tool is not neutral.
There are two versions of this mindset.
The useful version: you don't accept defaults. You run experiments. You cut what isn't working.
The annoying version: you can never just do something. You're always half-analysing it. You become the person at the dinner table explaining why the oil is bad.
I've made peace with both. Your kids learn by watching you, not by what you tell them. Inertia feels easier until you realize the direction it's carrying you isn't yours.
At least this way I'm the one making the choices.
Credits & further reading
- Atomic Habits — James Clear. The "systems over goals" argument is the most practically useful framing for why defaults matter more than intentions. The morning routine described in this note is more habit-stack than willpower. Clear's architecture for building habits (cue → craving → response → reward) is the mechanism under the hood.
- Designing Your Life — Bill Burnett & Dave Evans (Stanford). The literal application of design thinking to life decisions. Prototyping, iteration, "gravity problems" (constraints you've accepted as fixed that might not be). Worth reading if "treating life like a design problem" sounds interesting but abstract.
- Michael Pollan — In Defense of Food, The Omnivore's Dilemma. The food system skepticism in this note — reading ingredient lists, understanding what's actually in processed food, questioning why palm oil is in everything — comes from this direction of thinking. His rule "eat food, not too much, mostly plants" is close to what we practice.
- The Four-Hour Workweek — Tim Ferriss. Not a book I'd endorse wholesale, but the underlying move — questioning which defaults in your life were designed by someone else for someone else's benefit — is the same instinct this note describes. The question "who designed this, and for whose benefit?" comes from that direction.