This is a roundabout way of saying: make “good” behavior the easy choice. But there’s an interesting backstory to the saying.
I come from a family of manual laborers. My dad, all of my uncles, and most of my many cousins work in trades ranging from carpentry to plumbing to house painting. And one of the first things any good craftsman does when setting up at a new site? Installing a dustbin.
Why? Because construction work inevitably creates garbage: empty rolls of tape, old brushes, wrapping paper, single-use gloves. And if there’s nowhere to put them, they’ll almost certainly end up on the floor — where you’ll either trip over them, clean them up later, or worse, leave them littering the place.
The principle is well understood in behavioral science: humans are “lazy” by default. If there’s no dustbin in sight when you pull off your gloves and your mind is elsewhere, you’ll just drop them. But if there is a dustbin? Then the easy thing to do is also the right thing to do.
The same applies to software development and product work.
Example from poketto.me: for the longest time, running and debugging the Android app was a hassle. I had to change the base URL in two config files. Then I had to start my frontend with a different command so the emulator could access it. Then I had to set up remote debugging of the WebView. Just thinking about it made me skip the task in favor of something “easier.”
But once I bundled all of that into a single shell script, I could run and debug the Android app with basically one click.
The result? I’m much more engaged in fixing Android bugs now — because I made the right behavior the easy one.