The previous article made the case that context is everything. The obvious objection: "So I have to paste my life story into every chat?" No. That is exactly what Projects are for, and they are the most underused feature in Claude.
What a Project is
A Project is a workspace inside Claude that holds two things permanently: standing instructions, and knowledge files. Every conversation you start inside that Project automatically knows both. Brief once, benefit forever.
Think of it as the difference between a temp who shows up fresh every morning and a team member who has read the onboarding pack. Same intelligence, completely different usefulness.
What to put in one
Standing instructions. Who you are, what the business does, who your customers are, your tone of voice, your pet hates, your defaults. "We're a Perth based electrical contractor, residential and light commercial. Write in plain Australian English, friendly but professional, never use exclamation marks, always include our licence number in formal documents."
Knowledge files. The documents that a good employee would keep at their elbow: your price list or rate sheet, your service descriptions, a couple of past proposals you were proud of, your terms, your FAQ answers, your brand one pager. You do not need everything, five well chosen documents beat fifty random ones.
How I structure mine
I run a Project per venture and a Project per major function, and the pattern transfers directly to any business:
- One per business or client. All the standing context for that entity lives there, so strategy conversations pick up where the last one ended
- One per repeatable job. A Quoting project with the rate sheet and two gold standard past quotes. A Marketing project with the brand voice and best performing posts. A Board and Reporting project with the report template and last quarter's numbers
- Instructions that encode your standards. The real leverage is teaching the Project what good looks like once, in writing, so every output starts at your bar instead of the internet's average
The compounding effect is hard to overstate. After a few weeks, opening the right Project feels like turning to a colleague mid task rather than starting an induction.
Getting started this week
- Pick the one repetitive task where you most often use Claude already
- Create a Project for it, write five to ten lines of standing instructions
- Upload the two or three documents you find yourself pasting in repeatedly
- Run your next real task in there, and refine the instructions when the output misses
Keep the instructions alive. When you correct Claude for the third time on the same thing, that correction belongs in the Project instructions, not in another one off message. You are building an asset: a written, versionable definition of how your business communicates and works. That document is valuable even without the AI.
Setting up a Project with standing instructions and knowledge files
Next up: the word everyone is throwing around, agents. What actually is one, and how is it different from the chatbot you just built a Project in?