Mastering Claude’s Features and Power-User Commands Log in and enroll to track lesson completion. By the end of this lesson, students should be able to: The re-explanation tax. Every time you start a new conversation for an ongoing project – a job search, a business plan, a research project, a writing project, a job role – you pay a re-explanation tax. You re-paste the background document. You re-explain the constraints. You re-describe the audience. You re-establish what has already been decided. For short, one-off tasks, this is fine. For ongoing work that spans days, weeks, or months, it is a significant and unnecessary friction. Projects is the feature that eliminates this tax. What Projects does. Projects (verify current availability in your plan and interface) is a persistent workspace where you can: Think of a Project as a dedicated workspace for a specific ongoing task – like having a dedicated desk with all your materials already laid out, rather than clearing and resetting a shared table for every work session. How Projects differs from Custom Instructions. Custom Instructions apply to all your conversations globally – they are your general working preferences. Projects are specific to a single, defined work context. You might have Custom Instructions that reflect your general communication style, plus a Project for your job search, another for a business you are building, and another for a course you are taking. When you work inside a Project, both your Custom Instructions and the Project's specific context are active. What to put in a Project. Good Project content includes: Do not put: sensitive personal data, passwords, confidential client data without verifying your platform's data handling, or excessive irrelevant material that dilutes Claude's focus. Practical use cases for Projects. Verifying current feature availability. Projects may be available on certain plan tiers and not others. The feature set – how many Projects you can have, how much context you can store, whether file uploads are supported within Projects – varies and changes with product updates. Verify current availability and limits directly in your Claude interface or account settings before building critical workflows around this feature. A small business owner is using Claude to help develop a business plan for a food truck business. Without Projects: Session 1: She explains the concept, the target market, the location, the menu approach. Gets business structure advice. Session 2: She starts over. Re-explains everything. Gets financial planning help. Session 3: She starts over again. Re-explains everything. Gets marketing strategy help. Each session wastes the first 5-10 minutes re-establishing context that was already built. With a Project: She creates a "Food Truck Business Plan" Project. She uploads: a one-page business overview, the target neighborhood and demographic research she has done, the menu concept, and a note about decisions already made (LLC structure confirmed, location secured). Session 2 opens with all of that context already present. She says: "Building on what we've established, help me develop the financial projections section." No re-explanation. No re-establishing of context. Pure forward progress. The entire project is coherent and cumulative because the context persists. Write a "Project Orientation" document as your first upload to any Project. It should cover: what this project is, what decisions have already been made and are not open for reconsideration, what the final deliverable is, who the audience is, and any constraints Claude should always respect. When you start each session, Claude has a clear frame for the entire project – not just the most recent question. Projects stores documents and conversation history in your account. For Projects involving professional client work, legal matters, or sensitive business information: review your organization's AI use policies before uploading client-identifiable documents. Consider anonymizing or summarizing sensitive content rather than uploading it verbatim. Do not upload documents that contain personally identifiable information, protected health information, or confidential materials governed by NDA without verifying appropriate data handling is in place. Identify one ongoing project or goal in your life that you have used Claude for across multiple separate conversations. Create a Project for it (or write the content for one if the feature is not yet available in your plan). Write a one-paragraph Project Orientation document. List the three most important pieces of context that you would no longer need to re-explain. Imagine how your next Claude session for this project would begin differently. You should be able to explain what Projects does, how it differs from Custom Instructions, what content belongs in a Project, and two real situations where Projects would eliminate repeated re-explanation. Log in and enroll to take this lesson quiz.
Lesson 3: Projects – Building Persistent Workspaces for Ongoing Work
Lesson Objectives
Lesson Content
Practical Example
Lesser-Known Tip
Safety Notes
Practice Task
Completion Check
Lesson Quiz