I've known about tmux for years and used it the way most people do: occasionally, when I remembered, usually too late. The pattern was always the same. Kick off something long, a build or a sync, the train goes through a tunnel, the SSH session dies, and the job dies with it. Then a small, deserved feeling of being an idiot.
What finally made it stick wasn't learning more tmux. It was making "not using tmux" the harder option. Two aliases did it:
alias ta='tmux attach -t main || tmux new -s main'
ta either reattaches to my session called main or creates it. One letter, muscle memory within a week. Every remote box now gets ta the moment I'm in, so anything I run is already inside a session before I've decided whether it matters.
The other piece is tmux-resurrect, so a server reboot doesn't lose the layout I'd carefully built up. It saves panes and windows to disk and restores them with a keystroke. Not perfect, it won't bring back the running processes, but it brings back the shape, which is most of the friction.
That's the whole change. No clever status bar, no thirty-line config. Just two lines that turned tmux from a thing I admired into a thing I actually use, and one fewer way to lose an afternoon to a flaky connection.