Just arrived in Kea for a month and I’m already reminded why I love working remotely.

Ever since I started working remotely, I honestly can't imagine going back to a life where I have to be in an office every day. Having the freedom to work from somewhere like this, take a break and go for a swim, or just change my surroundings when I feel like it has completely changed my life.

I know remote work isn't an option for everyone, so I don't take it for granted. But for those of you who can work remotely, has it changed your life as much as it changed mine?

And for the digital nomads here — where are you spending the next month?

PROPOSED PLAN
**-**Live in a different state every 6 months
-Live cheap but still maintain your own place with your car and motorcycle
-Visit different cities and towns within 100 miles
-Travel internationally 3X per year: 2X work remote within Europe and South America; 1X Vacation in Asia
-Visit your family and friends on weekend trips
WORK CONSTRAINTS
-Work out of country for two weeks each time (2X)
-US Hours and you have 20 days of vacation
PERSONAL PREFERENCES
-Living quarters: place with no roommates
-Minimize U.S. rent and Maximize Travel Budget

Thoughts?

Is six months too short or too long for a good experience?
Keeping rent budget under $1500.

Figured I’d experience different states.

Starting with Philadelphia

In 1656, Baruch Spinoza was expelled from Amsterdam’s Jewish community. He was just 23.

He refused to abandon ideas he believed in and spent much of his life living modestly, earning money grinding lenses and optical instruments while writing philosophy. Some of his most important work was published posthumously.

There’s an appealing symmetry to Spinoza’s work. By day, he made tools that helped people see further. By night, he developed ideas intended to help them think further. Nearly four centuries later, we have acquired another kind of lens.

AI can extend what an individual can see, remember and do. But perhaps its most interesting use is not simply giving us access to a clever chatbot. It is allowing each of us to build a system around AI containing our own knowledge, experience and ways of working. This is our AI skill stack.

Technology should increase our power to act

>Technology is an extension of man. - Marshall McLuhan

In his 2026 Y Combinator Startup School talk, Gary Tan describes three ingredients: a frontier AI model, the context that belongs to us and a harness connecting the two. The model will likely increasingly become a commodity. Many of us will have access to roughly the same underlying intelligence, but our context will be different.

Two people can use the same AI model and get very different results. One starts every conversation by explaining the situation again. The other has years of notes, decisions, projects, relationships and working methods available to the agent.

Spinoza used the word conatus for the striving of a thing to persist and increase its power to act. That seems a useful test for AI: does it increase our power to act?

Our life is a library

>A computer is a bicycle for the mind. - Steve Jobs

By the time I left my 40 year corporate career in March, I had accumulated a lot of specialist knowledge. Some was captured in documents and tools, but the vast majority was not. It was in my head: why something had been designed a particular way, which approaches had already failed, where exceptions existed, who knew what and the context behind decisions made. When I left, much of that knowledge left with me because there had never really been an effective way to capture it.

AI potentially changes that. Gary Tan likens a person’s life to a library. The challenge is not simply giving an AI a huge context window. It is having a good librarian: something capable of finding the few pieces of information that matter for the problem in front of us.

The advantage is not that AI knows everything. It is that it can increasingly know which parts of what we know matter now.

Turn repeated work into reusable skills

>Civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. - Alfred North Whitehead

There is another source of leverage hiding in ordinary work. We repeatedly research competitors, analyse information, prepare reports and make decisions. Usually we complete the task while leaving much of the method behind.

AI agents make another approach possible. Skill files are reusable instructions for such tasks. A skill can describe what information to collect, where to find it, how to analyse it, which exceptions to look for and how the result should be structured. If you can explain a task clearly enough for an intelligent new employee to follow, an AI agent can increasingly follow it too.

My circumstances changed considerably. Instead of working inside a large corporation, I am a solo creator. I get to choose the tools I use and how I use them, including AI.

If I develop a good way to assess a product idea, research a market, specify a website or review something I have built, I can capture that process. The next time I perform the task, I do not have to start again. I can refine the skill: do the work, capture what worked, correct what did not and use the improved version next time.

Value starts to compound.

Build an asset that compounds

>All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare. - Baruch Spinoza

For much of my career, my accumulated experience was valuable but difficult to separate from me. I wrote documents, created processes and handed work over, but much of the underlying judgement remained tacit. Now that judgement can be made explicit.

An important decision can record not just what was decided but why. A recurring task can become a skill. When an AI agent gets something wrong, the correction can become part of the instructions it uses next time. There is, therefore, a big difference between “using AI” and “building with AI”. Using AI gives us an answer. Building with AI can create a system that becomes more useful each time we use it.

That system does not need to be particularly sophisticated. Start with a few project files, some useful context and one or two recurring tasks. Capture what we learn as we work.

Over time, the valuable asset may not be the AI model at all. Models will change, better ones will arrive and we will probably switch between them. What can persist is the layer around them: our accumulated context, judgement, decisions and ways of working.

Own what we learn

>Own your skills because if you don’t, your job becomes a skill file. - Garry Tan

This raises an uncomfortable question: who owns these accumulated skills?

In my corporate career, organisations paid me partly for knowledge and judgement accumulated over decades, yet much of it was never properly captured. In the future, far more of that knowledge may be encoded in systems and skill files.

For organisations, that creates an opportunity to retain knowledge that once walked out of the door. For individuals, it creates another opportunity: to deliberately build and maintain our own body of knowledge and capability.

As powerful AI becomes cheaper and more widely available, what remains scarce may be what we bring to it: our experience, context, judgement and methods.

Want more?

How to Design Effective AI Agents post by Phil Martin

Let the Chatbot Ask the Questions post by Phil Martin

Baruch Spinoza ground lenses so people could see further. Perhaps the modern equivalent is building tools that allow us to think, remember and act further than we could alone.

Have fun.

Phil…

I worked for a business with an expensive problem. For some important products, it often took more than two weeks to provide customers with price quotes. The delay was driven by the time it took our suppliers to provide their related cost quotes. By then, our customer had often bought elsewhere.

With colleagues, I developed a quoting tool using statistical analysis of historic supplier cost quotes. Instead of waiting for every response, we estimated costs with enough confidence to quote to our customers faster. Turnaround fell to around one day (a 10x improvement) and win rates increased.

We had not improved everything. We had removed the obstacle holding everything else back. Every system has a bottleneck: the stage, decision or resource that sets the pace. Improve it and the whole system improves.

The slowest car sets the speed

>What you have learned is that the capacity of the plant is equal to the capacity of its bottlenecks. - Eliyahu Goldratt

A friend once drove me 100 miles to a Phil Collins concert. For a long stretch of road, there were few safe places to overtake. Somewhere ahead, perhaps ten cars in front, was a slow driver.

Every car behind may have been capable of going faster, but it made no difference. Making the fifth car faster achieves nothing if it cannot pass the car ahead. Traffic speeds up only when the slow car does.

Businesses work the same way. A process may have ten stages, but one usually limits output. Improving the other nine may increase efficiency without increasing finished work.

Efficiency can make things worse

>An hour saved at a non-bottleneck is a mirage. - Eliyahu Goldratt

Imagine one machine produces 100 components an hour and the next can handle only 20. Running the first flat out does not increase output. It creates a queue of 80 components an hour.

The first machine looks productive; the factory is not. Work that cannot pass through the bottleneck creates delay. The goal is not maximum activity, but maximum flow.

Find where the work stalls

>If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing. - W. Edwards Deming

Finding the bottleneck starts by making the work visible. Choose a result and list the steps needed to produce it.

Take this weekly blog: choose a topic, gather notes, outline, draft, edit, record and publish. Choosing the topic can take me several days and little else starts until I have done it. The key question is not which stage feels hardest, but which limits finished output.

Exploit before investing

>Decide how to exploit the system’s constraint. - Eliyahu Goldratt

I worked for a business making plastic pellets used in washing machines and cars. In one old factory, material moved through pipes that sometimes blocked. Operators hit them to restart production so often that some originally round pipes had become almost square. The rest of the factory could work perfectly, but if one important pipe blocked, production stopped.

Once a constraint is found, don’t assume the answer is more money. First get more from what we have. If approvals slow a project, send smaller sections as they are completed. If meetings fragment concentration, group them together. If a small change increases output, we have probably found the constraint. Only then consider adding people, equipment or software.

Don’t improve the wrong things

>The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. - Michael Porter

Bottleneck thinking becomes uncomfortable when the constraint is work we dislike doing. I enjoy building products. Adding a feature or writing code feels productive. But I am increasingly aware that my constraint is often getting ideas in front of potential users and learning whether they solve a problem people care about.

Another feature cannot solve a shortage of customers. We gravitate towards work we enjoy, but improvement means concentrating effort where it changes total output.

The bottleneck will move

>Do not let inertia become the system constraint. - Eliyahu Goldratt

Fixing a bottleneck does not eliminate constraints. It moves them. A business short of leads may improve marketing, only to find that sales, onboarding, production or support now limits growth.

The danger is continuing to invest in what produced the last breakthrough. Yesterday’s bottleneck can become today’s comfort zone. So repeat the process: find the constraint, get more from it, invest if necessary, then ask: what is limiting us now?

Productivity is a systems problem

>A bad system will beat a good person every time. - W. Edwards Deming

Much productivity advice focuses on personal effort: wake earlier, work harder, concentrate longer. That helps only when personal effort is the constraint. Often it is not. The limiting factor may be an unmade decision, missing information, unreliable software or work waiting for approval. Working harder upstream merely creates a bigger queue.

Systems move at the pace of their constraints. Before trying to improve everything, find what is setting the speed. Then work on that.

Want more?

Four Ways to Prioritise Tasks and Optimise Productivity post by Phil Martin

Three Ways I Achieve More post by Phil Martin

Eliyahu Goldratt distilled the idea: “Balance flow, not capacity.”

Have fun.

Phil…