What does it mean that design systems that minimize willpower requirements?

The best behavioral systems run without requiring willpower.

Example: You want to eat a healthy lunch every workday. Plan A: rely on willpower each morning to choose a salad over fast food. Plan B: spend Sunday evening preparing five containers of meals, stacked in the refrigerator in daily order so you grab the next one without thinking. Plan A demands a conscious override of every hunger cue, every convenience heuristic, every time-pressure rationalization — five times per week, fifty weeks per year. Plan B demands willpower exactly once: the hour on Sunday when you prep. For the remaining 249 lunches, the system runs itself. The food is already made. The decision is already decided. The behavioral path of least resistance leads directly to the outcome you want. One system taxes willpower at every node. The other taxes it at one node and coasts on structure for the rest.

Try this: Select one behavior you currently sustain through daily willpower — exercising, eating well, writing, reading, meditating, or any recurring action that feels like a fight each time. Map the full decision chain from the moment the behavior should begin to the moment it is complete. Count the choice points: every place you must decide, resist, or override a competing impulse. Now redesign the system around that behavior with the explicit goal of eliminating as many choice points as possible. Use defaults, environmental staging, pre-commitment, or sequencing to collapse the chain. Write both versions — the current high-willpower version and the redesigned low-willpower version — and note how many decision points you removed. Implement the redesigned version for one full week.