How to set up Claude

Here is the thing I notice when I look over someone's shoulder while they use Claude. They are re-explaining themselves. Every single chat starts with who they are, what their business does, what tone they want, what they tried last time. That is not a prompting problem and no clever prompt fixes it. It is a setup problem.

Everything below is stuff you configure once, in the app, in your account. After that Claude carries the context for you and the quality of every answer jumps without you writing longer prompts.

Do them in order. One and two matter most, so if you only have ten minutes today, do those two and come back for the rest.

Fill out your custom instructions

Go to Settings and find the profile or personal preferences area. This is where you tell Claude who you are, what you do and the rules it should follow in every conversation. Save it once and it applies across your chats.

The mistake almost everyone makes here is writing something vague. “Be professional and concise” gives Claude nothing to work with, because professional means one thing for a law firm and another thing for a beauty brand. Write it the way you would brief a new assistant on their first day. Specific enough that a stranger could follow it without asking you a question.

Copy this and edit it

Who I am
I'm [name], based in [city]. I run [business or role] and my main work is [the two or three things you actually do all day].

Who I serve
[Describe your clients, customers or audience in one or two sentences. Include what they care about and what they already know.]

What I use you for most
[List the four or five tasks you bring here regularly. Be literal: drafting client emails, writing captions, reviewing code, planning lessons, summarising research.]

How I want you to write
[Your tone. Sentence length. Formal or casual. First person or third. Any word or phrase you never want to see.]

Rules
- Ask me a clarifying question when the brief is thin instead of guessing.
- Give me the answer first and the reasoning after.
- If I'm wrong about something, tell me plainly.
- [Add your own. The oddly specific ones are the useful ones.]

What a filled-in one looks like

I'm Ada, based in Lagos. I run a skincare brand with a small team of three and I handle marketing, customer messages and supplier follow-ups myself.

My customers are Nigerian women between 24 and 38 who have tried a lot of products and are tired of being sold to. They know the ingredient names. They can smell a sales pitch.

I come here mostly for Instagram captions, customer service replies, supplier emails and monthly numbers.

Write the way I talk to a customer in the DMs. Warm, direct, short paragraphs, no exclamation marks. Never use the word "elevate" and never open a caption with a question.

Rules
- Ask before you assume what the product does. Get it wrong and I lose trust with people who know their ingredients.
- Give me options when it's copy, one version when it's an email.
- Never write a caption longer than 90 words.

Create separate projects for the separate parts of your life

A project is a container. It holds its own instructions, its own files and its own chats, so everything inside it shares the same context. This is how you stop explaining your business at the top of every conversation.

If you run a business, make one project and put your brand guidelines, service list, pricing and a few pieces of writing you are proud of inside it. Now every chat in that project already knows your voice and your offer.

If you are job hunting, make one project for the whole search. Drop in your CV, your cover letter, the job descriptions you are chasing, notes from interviews you have already done. When a new role comes up you paste the description and ask for a tailored application, and Claude has your entire history sitting right there.

Other ones worth making, depending on your life: one per major client, one for a course you are studying, one for your personal writing, one for a specific product you are building.

Where people go wrong

They build one giant project called “Work” and pour everything into it. That defeats the point. The value comes from the boundary. A project that only knows about one client gives sharper answers about that client than a project that knows about nine.

The other miss is leaving the project instructions empty. Each project gets its own instructions on top of your global ones, and that is where the specifics go.

This project is for [client name], a [what they do] company.

My contract with them covers [scope]. My main contact is [name], who is [what they care about and how they like to be communicated with].

Their brand voice: [two or three lines].
Words and claims we are not allowed to use: [list].
Their approval process: [who signs off and how long it takes].

When I ask for anything in this project, assume it is for them and match their voice, not mine.

Connect the apps you already use

Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar, Notion, Slack and a long list of others. Connecting them means Claude can read from the places your work already lives, and take action there when you ask it to.

This is the step where Claude stops being a text box you paste things into. You stop copying an email in to get a reply drafted. You just say “reply to Tunde's email about the invoice, tell him the revised one goes out Friday” and it finds the thread and writes the reply.

A few things it handles well once connected: searching your inbox for anything you have not answered, pulling a document out of Drive and rewriting it, reading your calendar and telling you what your week actually looks like, dropping notes into Notion after a call.

Start with two, not ten

Connect your email and your calendar first. Live with them for a week. Add the next one when you hit an actual moment of friction, because a connector you never use is just another thing sitting in your settings.

Set up one scheduled task

You can have Claude run work on a schedule without you being there. Most people have no idea this exists. You write the instruction once, pick a time, and it runs on its own.

The obvious first one is a morning brief. It checks your calendar and your inbox before you wake up and hands you a short summary of what your day holds and what needs a response.

Every weekday at 7am, check my calendar for today and my inbox since 6pm yesterday.

Give me:
1. My meetings, with times, who is in them and anything I need to prepare.
2. Emails that need a reply from me, ordered by who has been waiting longest.
3. Anything that looks like it needs a decision rather than a reply.
4. One line on what I should handle first and why.

Keep it under 300 words. Skip newsletters and receipts. Do not send anything on my behalf.

Once that one is running, the pattern becomes obvious. A Friday task that pulls your week's numbers into a client update. A Sunday task that reads your saved links and turns them into content ideas. A Monday task that flags every invoice still unpaid past thirty days.

One rule before you schedule anything

Run the instruction manually two or three times first and fix the wording until the output is genuinely what you want. A task that runs at 7am every day producing something mediocre is worse than no task, because you stop reading it by week two and then you are just generating noise.

Create one reusable skill

A skill is a set of instructions Claude loads automatically when the task matches. It is how you teach it to do something the same way every time instead of re-explaining the method.

Say you have a house format for your decks: a specific structure, a colour system, a rule that every slide gets one idea. Write that down once as a skill. From then on, when you ask for a deck, you get your deck, not a generic one.

Good candidates are the things you do repeatedly with a method attached. Client proposals. Weekly reports. Social captions in your format. Code reviews against your team's standards. Lesson plans in your structure.

What a skill actually is

A folder with a file called SKILL.md inside it. That file has a name, a description and the instructions. The description is the part that decides whether the skill fires, so write it using the exact phrases you say out loud when you want that task done.

---
name: client-proposal
description: Write a client proposal in my format. Use whenever I say "write a proposal", "draft a proposal for [client]", "put together a scope for", or paste a client brief and ask for pricing.
---

# Client proposal

## Structure
1. What they told me their problem is, in their words.
2. What I think the real problem is.
3. The scope, broken into phases with a deliverable per phase.
4. Timeline with dates, not durations.
5. Investment, priced per phase.
6. What I need from them to start.

## Rules
- Never open with a paragraph about my company.
- Price in [currency]. Never show an hourly rate.
- Every deliverable is a noun the client can point at, not an activity.
- Maximum two pages.

## Tone
[Paste two or three sentences from a proposal that won, so it has something to match.]

You do not have to write these by hand. Describe the task out loud to Claude, including all the fussy little rules you have, then ask it to turn that into a skill for you. That is how I built most of mine.

The thirty minute version

If you want to just sit down and do it now, this is the order and roughly what each one costs you.

• Write your custom instructions in Settings10 min
• Create your first project and add three files to it8 min
• Connect your email and your calendar3 min
• Set up the morning brief and pick your time5 min
• Describe one repeated task and ask Claude to build it into a skill6 min

Then leave it alone for a week and pay attention to what still annoys you. Whatever you correct twice belongs in your custom instructions or in a project. That loop is the whole game, and it is why my setup today looks nothing like it did when I started.