Transcription
Five things you need to do immediately when you start using Claude.
A lot of people are switching to Claude right now, but most of them are just opening it up expecting it to be amazing because we've seen all the hype about it. That's fine, but you are barely scratching the surface. You're not really training it for success. So, this just honestly takes about 10 minutes.
The first step is a big one. Just go to settings. In that profile section, there's a big text box and this is where you tell Claude all about you. Who you are, what you do, your processes, your weekly routine, the tools you use, everything imaginable about you. Now, I did build a little site moveime.com. You can go to that and it'll tell you how to actually extract that out of something like ChatGPT or Gemini if you've been using those a lot. Um, it'll tell you how to get your kind of memories and an overview of you. Or you could just talk about this with Claude. You could just say, "Hey, I want to write some custom instructions for settings. Um, ask me all the questions you need to ask me to get the information you need," and it will write it and you can paste that in.
Okay. Number two, turn on all the memory settings. This is in settings capabilities. This is actually for free users as well now. So it means Claude remembers things between conversations, what you're working on, your preferences, your projects, and it just feels a lot more personal with every single chat that you have with it.
Number three, create a custom writing style. So you see the main chat box, right? There's a plus sign in the bottom left. Hit that. Down the menu you will see "Use Style" and there's a few different styles like normal, learning, concise, etc. But you can add your own. So go to "Create and Edit Styles" and then just paste in an example of your writing. So maybe you might have a certain style for writing your emails. Give it one of your most typical emails. Give it a few if you want. Paste that or those in and then it will mimic that style every time you activate that writing style. So you could have a few like LinkedIn posts, emails, blog posts, product descriptions, whatever.
Number four is set up a project for any task that you do regularly or a particular project that you're working on. Projects work a lot like the projects feature in ChatGPT where you can upload documents, you can give instructions and it's all sealed within that project. So when you work, you know, you have chats within that project, it's very much just drawing on the knowledge and the memory of what's in that project. So that can be really useful as a way to keep it separate from your general chats and your general memory.
Number five is connect your tools. So if you go to "Customize" in the left-hand menu and then "Connectors," you'll see that you can now connect Google Drive, Gmail, Calendar, Canvas, Slack, Notion, Asana, all kinds of things. And once they're connected, Claude can search your email, your Google Drive, whatever, as part of a task. And if you set those permissions to, you know, "always allow," then it doesn't even have to ask you first. It can just dip in and grab stuff as and when it needs. You can set up calendar events, all kinds of things for you.