Claude has quietly become one of the most powerful AI tools. Its most surprising and useful feature launched this summer: Projects. I can now train Claude to assist me with anything I’m working on by uploading up to 500 pages of my relevant notes, files, and examples.

Read the full published post on Substack

How to use Claude Projects

Step 1. Upload contextual materials. After initiating a new project I upload relevant materials. I can provide examples of my past work, outlines, notes, interview transcripts, past feedback, or whatever else might help ensure the relevance and usefulness of AI replies.

Step 2. Set custom instructions. I provide Claude with custom instructions for supporting me on the project. I tell it about my project’s context and goals. I specify a role Claude should play. And I detail the desired tone, form, and style of responses Claude should provide in response to my prompts.

Note: These overarching project instructions are not specific to any one prompt. They remain part of Claude’s instructions over the course of a long series of iterative queries. But they’re only for that project, so they won’t interfere with how Claude responds to my prompts related to other projects.

Step 3: Begin prompting. I draft prompts for Claude to assist me as I work on the project. I provide these prompts to reduce the time I spend on menial or technical tasks Claude can take care of splendidly. That allows me to expand the range of creative ideas I can consider and ensures I have the bandwidth to do work I would otherwise have to give up on.

Benefits of Claude Projects

I can create as many projects as I need. It’s easy to create separate projects for each area of focus. For each project, I upload materials specifically relevant to that project.

For example, for a teaching project, I can upload past teaching plans I’ve created, as well as transcripts of presentations I’ve given. For a new volunteering project I’m working on, I can upload my past notes, ideas, outlines, and drafts to help Claude assist me in developing a new multifaceted project plan.

Why this is useful. Rather than tossing queries at ChatGPT with just a short prompt to give it context, Claude can tailor its answers based on extensive background materials, past examples, and detailed instructions. That transforms it into a hyper-personalized digital assistant.

Note on privacy. Anthropic, which operates Claude, doesn’t train its model on the material I upload or the prompts I submit. Here’s the policy summarized simply. Exceptions to this arise if material you submit is flagged for safety or trust review, or if you give a response a thumbs up or down. That’s one reason I don’t use the thumbs up/down feature to rate Claude’s responses.

Pricing: Claude’s basic AI is free for anyone to use. Projects, though, require Claude Pro, at $20/month. I justify spending that on Claude by observing that it’s performing the role of a valuable digital assistant for a month for less than what it might cost me to hire someone for an hour.

The team plan costs $25/month/person and requires at least five members, who can then share and collaborate on projects.

Ideas for using Claude’s Projects

* Draft project or event plans. Provide Claude with notes, goals, deadlines, project context and any other relevant documents. Prompt it to assist you in creating detailed project plans, timelines, memos, step-by-step task lists and more.

Tip: Remind Claude to ask questions whenever it needs additional information to provide targeted, useful responses. Give it feedback after its initial responses to push it in whatever direction you need.

* Prepare for workshops or classes. Provide background on the class or workshop you’re teaching, your objectives, and your pedagogical style. Then task Claude with assisting you in generating examples to use in class, provocative discussion or quiz questions, outlines for slide presentations, analogies, anecdotes, jokes or whatever else might help you create engaging sessions.

Tip: Ask it to generate multiple possible approaches and instruct it to be surprising, creative and to create intriguing, unexpected materials.

* Get assistance on hobby projects. Whether you’re putting together an outline for fan fiction, a visitor’s guide to your plant collection, or an onboarding guide for a new volunteer or club member, you can save hours with Claude’s project assistance.

30+ more ways to use Claude Projects

I created a project with Claude so it could help me dream up a collection of ideas for surprising ways to use Claude Projects.

Prompting Tips

In addition to uploading relevant documents, provide detailed instructions about the kinds of responses that will be useful for you. For example, if you set up a project to assist you with a class aimed at students at a particular grade or skill level, note that so that responses will take that level into account. Additional tips:

* Define your target tone. Ask Claude to adopt a casual tone or to be concise and direct in its responses or to use whatever style of language you prefer.

* Assign a role. Ask Claude to respond to your prompts from the perspective of an expert in your specific industry or job.

* Remind Claude to go slow. For complex tasks that have multiple parts, tell Claude to "think step-by-step" and ask it to "explain your reasoning” to ensure it takes into full account the materials and details you’ve shared.

Caveats

* Claude can’t generate images like ChatGPT Pro or Microsoft’s free Copilot.

* The steep $20/month charge only seems worthwhile if you use Projects. Claude’s top model is now available, albeit for limited use, in its free plan. So if you’re just interested in occasional isolated queries, there’s no need to pay.

* You can’t upload links into Claude as you can with some AI tools that will parse them for you. Nor can you upload video or audio files, though you can upload transcripts of those files.

Alternatives

* NotebookLM is a useful free Google tool that lets you create notebooks with your own documents you can then query with AI. Here’s my guide. It’s a great free alternative to Claude if your goal is to observe patterns in your documents or explore connections with your materials. But Claude provides Claude provides a richer, fuller chat interaction based on documents you upload than NotebookLM.

* Perplexity lets you create Pages based on search queries to organize summary material on topics you’re exploring. Helpfully, the information you curate in Pages includes citations, so you can trace the info back to its original sources. Rather than deriving these pages from your own material, though, Perplexity’s Pages assist you in organizing information its provided through its AI-powered searches.