Remote work offers a lot of freedom, but it comes with some traps. Thankfully, you can mitigate some of those traps with the advice in this month's issue.

I completed my 13th book recently, and I'm working hard on another, so I thought it would be helpful to explain why I'm still producing books when everyone has access to LLMs.

Let's look at remote work first.

How to Work Remotely

Working remotely can be challenging. You may not have control over how the company operates, but you can and should control what you can to have a productive, healthy experience. I've worked remotely in some capacity for almost 20 years, either in part-time roles as a consultant or as a full-time employee at a remote-first organization. Here's how you can be successful.

Be proactive with communication

Working remotely does not mean working alone in a silo. Unfortunately, it sure does make it easier to do that.

Make sure people know you exist. Make time to participate in public Slack conversations outside of your team. Start a "Good Morning" ritual with your team. Send a "Here's what I did today" message to the team in your team Slack channel. Make sure you're checking in with your manager more than just at your 1:1.

Work with your manager and team to find ways to celebrate your wins. Share weekly status updates of your team's progress toward goals. Celebrate milestones and accomplishments. This increases your team's visibility in the organization.

Some companies and teams are pretty quiet, but all it takes is one person to start consistently communicating more publicly, and others eventually jump in. Some folks just want someone else to kick it off.

Have an office space

You want a place to work that's separate from your living area. Having a door you can close to separate you from other distractions helps you keep focused. If you work from the couch, it's easy to be distracted by the sounds of your environment, things going on outside, or even the TV. If you see the kitchen, you might be overwhelmed by the mess and feel you need to clean it. Conversely, if you work from your couch, you might have your laptop handy when you shouldn't be working. Creating physical boundaries between work and home life reduces the temptation to work when you should be doing something else.

You may not have an office in your home; that's a luxury not everyone has. But you should find a way to create a space dedicated to work so that you can "put work away" for the night. It can be in a spare bedroom or just a corner of your main living space with a privacy divider. The key is creating some physical division between where you work and where you live.

You should also make sure you have appropriate ergonomic equipment. Get a chair you can sit in for eight hours. Get a good screen and good lighting. When you work from home, you're responsible for your workplace ergonomics. A good desk chair might cost $1000, but neck, back, leg, and shoulder pain from poor posture are costly in other ways. This is another reason why sitting on the couch or at the kitchen counter isn't the best for you long-term.

"Commute"

The trip to the office and back takes up considerable time out of your day, but it offers a hidden benefit: transition time. On your way to work, you can gradually shift from your personal life to your work life. After a hard day, you can leave your work frustrations behind as you prepare to transition back to your family, friends, or both. But if you work from home, your commute means shuffling from one room to another, and the only traffic you face is your cat. There's not much time for reflection or transition time.

Give yourself a commute to clear your head. If the weather is nice, start your day by going for a walk around your neighborhood. Or get in the car and drive around while listening to a chapter of an audiobook or a podcast. If it's cold or rainy or miserable, do a mental commute. Be alone with your thoughts. Meditate, do some reflective writing, and give yourself some "taxi time." This is especially important at the end of your day when stress levels tend to be highest.

Remote work doesn't have to mean working from home, either. You could take advantage of a cowering space and commute to that. That also helps keep work and home life separated.

Embrace a routine

Working remotely, especially from home, is great if you have a lot of deep work to do, but it's easy for some people to get super focused on work because there's nothing to interrupt their flow. Some people might even roll out of bed and get right to work.

You should treat a remote job, especially a work-from-home job, like any other job. Do your morning routine like you would if you were going out of the house. Take care of the personal hygiene stuff, put on work clothes, have your coffee and breakfast, and get yourself into the

Create a schedule and stick to it. Put your working hours in Google Calendar. Silence notifications outside of those working hours. Make sure everyone on your team knows your availability.

Be sure to take regular breaks. Put lunch in your calendar so you get a meeting notification every day. Get up and stretch once in a while. Go for walks to clear your head.

Forge connections and friendships

Work sometimes feels transactional and can be even more transactional in a remote environment. "I need this from Marketing." "Sales needs this from me." The reality is that we do things for others when we have to out of obligation. But when a friend asks us for something, we're more likely to prioritize it or go the extra mile.

Nudge coworkers to do a virtual coffee once in a while. Create "no work" hangouts with adjacent teams once a month. Talk about wins inside and outside of work. Share gratitude with others. In no time at all, you'll start building stronger relationships with a few people, and that's incredibly helpful when it comes time to meet them in person at an offsite. It's lonely traveling to a company offsite when you don't know anyone, but it's a lot more fun when you are friendly enough with others that you can arrange to meet at the airport and carpool to the venue together.

Remember to keep the offsite energy going when you get back into your remote life. Nudge the people you shared a meal with to see how you can help them, or ask if they're up for a monthly catchup.

When you forge bonds with people, you'll find you get more things done in the long run. People who work together physically form these bonds. It takes more effort in remote environments, but it's still possible.

Books Are Still Important in the Age of LLMs

Thanks to the Internet connecting people all over the world, you can learn any skill you want from any number of other people who shared their experience. You even have your choice of people to learn from. However, tools like ChatGPT and Claude are replacing search engines and blogs for people who are looking to learn. Instead of hacking your way through a regular expression on regex101.com, you can ask your favorite LLM to write one for you and then ask it to explain how it works. It sounds almost too good to be true.

When I first wrote the tmux book back in 2012, someone snakily asked me on Twitter why anyone would pay for a book when the man page exists. Fast-forward to 2025 and the tmux book is in its third edition and selling nicely. Despite competition from LLMs, Stack Overflow, and many, many blogs, people still buy the book. But why?

A good book is a narrative based on experience, not just a reference guide or a rehash of official documentation. I don't write reference books; I write learning material. And that's been a huge key to my success as an author. Thankfully, that's what my publisher aims to produce with all of their books. People aren't paying for a book; they are paying for your experience and expertise.

There are different types of content, each serving a different purpose. There's conceptual content, reference content, tutorial content, and how-to content. The Diátaxis framework lays this all out in great detail, so I won't rehash it here. But if you do any kind of content work, you should get familiar with Diátaxis right now.

On the surface, LLMs are pretty great at task-based and reference content, but only in areas where they have a lot of context. But the more specialized the content is, the more cracks you see.

That's the other reason people still turn to books, especially ones backed by a reputable publisher with editors and technical reviewers: those books are peer-reviewed and vetted. People are standing behind the work, vouching for its accuracy and completeness. A blog post, a Stack Overflow comment, or an LLM may have an answer. But is it the right answer? We know that current LLMs are basically prediction engines, and they are known to make stuff up. You won't get away with that in a book. You're held to a higher standard as an author.

This technical correctness piece is the biggest reason why books still have a place: they're curated. If you are new to the subject matter, you won't know if the LLM is making things up, and you won't have the experience to know how to apply what you learned. Books are a guide. A golden path to picking up a new technology.

You're probably thinking, "Why books and not video? People like video these days." I produced short-form videos for Small, Sharp Software Tools. The pages get good engagement, but the videos don't. It takes extra time to record technical "how to" videos that stand up to scrutiny, and the return on that time investment wasn't there for me. This tracks with my experience looking at websites with hundreds of thousands of unique visitors each month: software developers looking to accomplish a task do not watch videos. They read the docs because they can copy the code and easily control the pacing. This is why you have to look at the actual engagement of all of your content, not just the view counts or "likes" it gets.

Regardless of the medium, the point stands: it's not the book on its own; it's the collective experience of the people involved in producing it and the curation. The subject-matter expert who provides real-world contextualized answers based on their experience, the developmental editor who helped that SME craft a strong narrative, and the technical reviewers who challenged the SME's experience all worked together to deliver material that helps you solve problems quickly.

LLMs are trained on existing data, including books, video transcripts, blogs, and documentation. People still have to write those pieces of content. And the most effective content will be content that's contextualized based on the author's experience. I'm excited to keep doing that, and I invite you to do so as well.

One last thing: you don't need to go through a traditional publisher, but if you want to demonstrate credibility with your audience, you should hire a development editor, get help with typesetting, and find technical experts to ensure your content is correct. Your readers will benefit from the collective expertise, and you'll be able to compete.

Think you have a book in you? We should talk.

Things To Explore

Dato gives you access to your calendar and your meetings right from your Mac's task bar, but the reason I bought it was that I can turn on a feature that gives me full-screen meeting notifications that interrupt whatever I'm doing. I have been typing a message or writing a line of code and had Dato stop me dead in my tracks with a link to join the meeting that's about to start. It's been fantastic.

Parting Thoughts

If you look at the advice about remote work in this issue, which things have you found that work well for you, and which things will you commit to trying in the next month? Try to pick one small thing you can do with your team and then see how it went at the end of the next month.

Thanks for reading.

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