AI is a wonderful tool these days. A simple chat with any of the available AI products can help you advance so much in any project you’re doing. For me personally, I’ve been using Claude Projects for about a full year now, and it has been a game-changer in helping me streamline day-to-day activities in specific areas. In this post I’m going over my process on how to get the most out of Claude Projects.
Claude Projects for…what?
You might be wondering first of all, what should I use it for? Using AI for “projects” sounds so broad, so vague. To start us off, here are some examples of what I’ve been using Projects for.
- A Youtube Channel Manager
- A Healthy Lifestyle Coach
- A Content Management Assistant
- A Financial Advisor
Each of these projects have a very clear goal in mind. My YouTube Channel project exists for the sole purpose of managing and growing my YouTube Channel: ItisLeon. The Healthy Lifestyle Coach is there to get my diet under control and assist me in properly managing my workout schedules as a full-time employee with a, sometimes too active, social life. And the Content Management Assistant helps me manage this website and SEO metadata all while maintaining branding consistency and overall content direction. The Financial Advisor speaks for itselfs, and has helped me tremendously in getting my budgets under control.
These projects are a great time saver most of all. Tasks for YouTube or this website that took me hours before, now take mere minutes. All I need is a properly set-up project space and some basic instructions to get started. And how I exactly do that, I’ll be sharing in this post!
How to set up your own Claude Projects
In order to set up your own projects in Claude AI, here are four simple steps you need to take to get it working in the most efficient way possible.
Start a new project and give it a clear title and description.
Set your instructions first. Each project allows for special instructions, and this is the most important part. Set this up before you do anything else. These are the exact instructions I use, feel free to steal them:
“Never assume, always ask for user verification when in doubt” “Do not fill in the blanks for the user, check” “Explain your reasoning simple, concise and to the point” “Do not alter content or output without informing the user what you altered” “Work with .MD artifacts to store knowledge properly” “Instruct the user, at significant milestone, to create a .md artifact of a chat’s history or outcomes for the project file library” “If needed, instruct the user to create specialized chats for certain tasks or activities within this project based of a prompt template you will provide the user” “Any prompt template you generate must be based off general Agentic AI workflows”
Once the instructions are set, start your first conversation with Claude. In this conversation, outline your project goal, your available resources, any restrictions and any relevant data you can share. This can be reports, documents, screenshots, code, you name it. Just share it!
After this first chat, the project will lead you on your way. Just follow the instructions, give it new tasks whenever you need and see where it takes you.
My projects explained
I use these three projects on a daily basis at this point. The Healthy Lifestyle Coach has been a great asset especially. I went through the effort of scanning in almost all of my food and pantry labels I use regularly, basically building an entire digital library of my pantry’s nutritional values. I can now just ask for a healthy recipe based on what I usually shop, and it churns out new recipes ready to go.
The Content Manager is a great help in keeping everything I do on this website streamlined and ordered. It has access to my brand and content strategy guides, so whenever I create a new post I just share it within the project for feedback. After some minor adjustments it’s usually good to go.
My YouTube Channel Manager does exactly what it implies. It handles all the administration surrounding my YouTube Channel. It helps me analyze my metrics, come up with SEO-proof metadata and can even analyze thumbnails and screenshots for input. You can read more about this in my other post here, or check out the Claude Skills I offer to download for free so you can replicate this yourself.
The Financial Advisor is pretty self-explanatory. It gives me advice on my financial situation, mainly for sanity checks and course correction. One concrete result I got from it is reaching a positive net worth by paying off my student loans in a structured way, based on the outputs of the project.
It takes some upfront effort, no doubt about it. But that’s the point. A project that knows your goals, your resources and your preferences is a completely different experience than a random chat. Once it clicks, you’ll wonder why you weren’t doing this from the start. Give it a shot, and feel free to reach out if you need assistance or want to spar about this or other AI use-cases!