Your Claude, set up properly. Seven short days, one small action each. By the end of the week Claude stops treating you like a stranger, starts working inside your business instead of just talking about it, and you'll know exactly what to build next.
Work through one day at a time, in order. Each day has a bit of reading, one prompt to copy into Claude, and a short "done when" checklist so you can see you've actually landed it. Don't skip ahead. Day 1 sets the foundation the rest of the week stands on, and Day 7 tells you whether you're ready for Cowork.
The seven days are folded up below so the page stays short. Tap any day to open it. Copy any prompt marked Copy this straight into Claude, fill in the gaps in [square brackets], and go.
Everything you set up this week lands in one of three homes. Keep this in the back of your mind the whole way through, because by Day 7 you'll use it to decide exactly what to build for your own business.
A fact about you. Who you are, what you sell, how you sound. Something that's true and stays true.
A task you repeat the same way every time. Captions, DM replies, a certain kind of email, a first-draft blog post.
A one-off. Don't build anything, just ask the question and move on.
What about Projects? A Project is a separate workspace for one ongoing job or client. Handy for keeping things apart. But a Project is not the home for your always-on identity, because things you put in a Project get stuck in that Project. Your identity and your voice belong in your Profile, where every chat can see them.
One thing to remember about skills. The signal to build a skill isn't excitement, it's repetition. When you catch yourself asking Claude the same thing for the third time, that's your next skill telling you what it is.
The free plan is fine for the first couple of days. Connectors and skills, which land on Days 4 and 5, need a paid plan (Pro or Max). Every plan has usage limits, so if Claude tells you you've hit a cap, wait a while or upgrade. It's not personal.
On personal Pro and Max plans, your chats aren't used to train Claude by default, and you control every connection you make. Putting your business information in is safe, and it's the thing that makes Claude actually useful to you. If you ever want to check, it's all in Settings, under Privacy.
Each day is folded up. Open the one you're on, do the action, tick the "done when" list, then come back tomorrow for the next.
Five minutes of setup that saves you hours of repeating yourself. Do this before anything else this week.
Go to Settings, then Profile. Claude reads this before every single response, so you fill it in once and it stops guessing at who you are. Cover four things: who you are, the tools you use every day, what you use Claude for, and how you want it to talk to you.
My name is [NAME]. I run [BUSINESS] in the [INDUSTRY] industry.
I mainly use Claude for: [content, emails, research, planning].
Tools I use daily: [list them].
Response style: keep it concise and direct. Bullet points for lists. Push back if my idea has a flaw.
That last line does more than it looks. Claude told to push back becomes a business partner. Claude left on its defaults becomes a yes-man who agrees with everything you say, which is worse than useless.
Go to Settings, then Capabilities, and toggle these on: Memory (Claude learns about you over time), Search past chats (pick up an old conversation), Artefacts (real documents and pages, not just text), and Code execution and file creation (real files you can download and use).
Instead of an answer trapped in the chat, Claude builds you a real thing in a panel beside it. Something you can edit, download, and use. A few to try this week:
Build me a simple one-page booking enquiry form for my website.
Turn this messy list into a clean checklist I can print.
Make me a little pricing calculator my clients can use.
Design a welcome page for my new members.
With Memory on, Claude quietly remembers things about you across chats, so you stop repeating yourself. If you're coming across from ChatGPT, Settings, then Memory, then Import pulls your saved context over. And give it a spring-clean now and then: Memory can hold onto things that are no longer true, a price you've changed, a project you finished months ago. Tidy memory means sharper answers.
Default to Sonnet for writing, content, and strategy. Switch to Opus for coding or heavier analysis, but know it uses your allowance faster, so don't live there. Use Haiku for quick lookups where you just need a fast answer.
Fill in your Profile, toggle the capabilities on, then start a fresh chat and ask:
Based on what you know about me, what should I be using you for that I'm probably not?
Claude isn't a search engine. It's a conversation. Today you break the habit of treating it like a box you type one question into.
Give context like you would a contractor. "Write me an email" gets you generic. "Write a follow-up to a client who went quiet after a proposal two weeks ago, warm but not desperate" gets you something you can actually send.
Iterate instead of starting over. First draft off? Don't open a new chat. Tell Claude what's wrong: "too formal", "shorter", "you missed the pricing point". Each round builds on the last. Starting a new chat throws away everything it's just learned about what you want.
Make it push back. Ask "what's wrong with this plan?" before you ask it to run with it. Claude that agrees with everything is Claude being lazy, and it's you missing the flaw you couldn't see.
Here's a messy brain dump of everything I need to get done this week. Turn it into a prioritised action plan: urgent versus important, a time estimate per task, and flag anything I should delegate or drop.
Brain dump: [paste everything in your head]
I need to understand [topic] well enough to [what you're using it for]. Skip the history. Give me the five things I actually need to know, the most common misconceptions, and three questions I should be asking that I'm probably not.
Draft a reply to this message. Warm, direct, casual, no corporate language.
Message: [paste what you received]
Context: [one sentence about the situation]
Then iterate at least twice. That's the actual lesson today, not the first draft.
Today Claude learns what you sell, who you sell it to, your prices, and your goals. The trick is putting it somewhere it actually travels with you.
A short summary in your Profile: two or three sentences on who you are, what you sell, and who you sell it to. This rides along in every chat automatically. The deep version in a doc: full offers, pricing, ideal client, positioning. That's too much for the Profile, so it lives as a document you pull in when you're doing real work.
Don't write either from a blank page. Let Claude interview you. Answering questions is far easier than staring at a cursor, and it'll ask you things you'd never think to include yourself.
Interview me about my business so you can write two things: a three-sentence summary I can paste into my Claude Profile, and a fuller business context document with my offers, pricing, ideal client, and 90-day goals. Ask me one question at a time. When you've got enough, write both.
Paste the three-sentence summary into Settings, then Profile, underneath what you added on Day 1. Save the fuller doc somewhere you'll find it again: a note, a Google Doc, or a Project if you like working that way. Keep it, because you'll reuse it constantly.
Once the summary's in your Profile, start a fresh chat with no Project attached, and ask:
Based on what you know about my business, what's the biggest opportunity I'm not acting on?
If it answers well in a brand new chat, you've proved it. Your business now travels with you everywhere.
Up to now Claude has been advising you from the outside. Today you let it in, carefully, and you stay in control of every step.
Find connectors under the suitcase icon, then Customise, then Connectors. No API keys, no technical setup, you just sign in. Start with two, and only two: your calendar and your inbox. On Google? Connect Google Calendar and Gmail. On Microsoft 365? Connect Outlook Calendar and Outlook. Drive, Slack, Notion, and Canva can all wait.
You get three settings for each connection. Always allow for read-only things, like looking at your calendar. Ask me first for anything that sends or changes something. Never allow blocks whatever you don't want touched at all. The sensible default: reading is automatic, sending needs your sign-off.
Look at my calendar for the next two weeks. What are the biggest problems with how I've scheduled my time? Where am I overloaded? Where could I fit a two-hour deep work block? Give me an action plan to fix it.
Search my inbox for emails from the last week that I haven't replied to but should. Rank them by how overdue the reply is, and give me a one-line summary of what each one needs from me.
That second prompt tends to find money. Unanswered enquiries, follow-ups you meant to send and forgot, it's all sitting in there.
A skill is a saved workflow. Instead of explaining what you want from scratch every time, you train it once and it runs your way from then on. Two parts, that's all: a description, so Claude knows when to reach for the skill, and a workflow, your step-by-step way of doing the task.
Go to the suitcase icon, then Customise, then Skills, and toggle on Skill Creator. Start a chat and describe what you want, something like: "Create a skill that helps me reply to Instagram DMs in my voice." Answer the interview questions honestly, this is the bit that makes the skill actually good. When it's done, hit Copy to your skills. Good first skills: a DM responder, a client email drafter, a content repurposer, or a "vibe check" that gives you brutally honest feedback before you post.
Notice something when you build a writing skill: you don't have to tell it your voice. It already knows, because your voice lives in your Profile from Day 3, and every skill you build inherits it automatically. Define your voice once, use it everywhere. That's the whole trick.
Already done something in Claude this week that worked brilliantly? Say:
Can we turn what we just did into a skill?
Claude packages the whole conversation into a reusable workflow for you. Honestly, this is how most of my skills actually get made. Not planned in advance, captured after the fact when something worked.
Yesterday you built a skill and saw that it inherits your voice from your Profile for free. That's the floor. Today you build the ceiling.
Your Profile voice is brilliant for the everyday stuff: DMs, quick emails, replies. But for high-stakes writing, a sales page, a launch email, a long post where every word has to earn its place, you want more than "sounds a bit like me." You want a skill that loads your full voice guide on top of the Profile floor: your good and bad examples, your banned phrases, your hook style, the way you structure a piece.
Create a copywriting skill for me. It should use my brand voice, and I'll give it my full voice guide, with good and bad examples, to follow closely: banned phrases, my hook style, how I structure a piece. When I ask it to write a sales page, email, or long post, it writes in my voice and checks its own draft against the bad examples before showing me. Interview me to set it up.
That's the difference. Your Profile voice is the floor, everywhere and free. A copywriting skill is the ceiling, the deep treatment reserved for the writing that actually matters.
Last day. Nothing new to set up. Today you turn this week's setup into a way of working, and you find out whether you're ready for Cowork.
You've got the containers now: Profile, docs, skills. The question is what goes in them. So don't brainstorm, just list what you actually do in a normal week, then sort each one against the rule from Day 1: a fact about you goes in your Profile or a doc, a task you repeat becomes a skill, a one-off is just a chat. Write out a handful of things you do most weeks, tag each one, and you've got your personal build list.
Then build just one. The task you do most and enjoy least. Not your whole system, just your first one thing. The next one will announce itself when you catch yourself doing it for the third time.
Be honest here, and only tick what's genuinely true. All five true and you're ready to move into Cowork.
Most people who bounce off Cowork bounced because they skipped this bit. The check exists so Cowork works for you first time.
One thing to know. Cowork works from files on your computer, and it can't see what's inside your web Projects. So when you're ready, the move is simple: keep your business doc and your voice guide as files in one folder, and point Cowork at that folder. There's even a one-tap way to bring your existing setup across, so you're not rebuilding anything. Your Profile, your voice, and your docs all carry over.