Your First Week with Claude: A Setup Checklist

Most businesses and teams that “have Claude” are using a fraction of it. Someone opens a chat, asks a question, gets a decent answer, and that’s where it stops.

This checklist gets you past that in one week. You don’t need any technical background, just about 30 minutes a day.

Day 1: Decide what Claude is for

Before you touch any settings, write down three tasks that eat your week. Good candidates are things you do often, involve a lot of writing or reading, and follow a loose pattern:

• Answering similar customer emails
• Writing proposals or quotes
• Summarizing meeting notes into next steps
• Drafting social posts or newsletters

Start with the work you dread, not the work you find interesting.

Day 2: Tell Claude about your business

Claude does its best work when it knows who you are. Write a short “about us” in plain language covering:

1. What you sell and who you sell it to
2. How you like to sound (warm? direct? formal?)
3. Words or phrases you always or never use

Save this somewhere you can reuse it. You’ll paste it into a Project tomorrow.

Day 3: Create your first Project

A Project in Claude is a dedicated workspace with its own instructions and files. Create one for your first task from Day 1, for example “Customer Emails.”

• Paste your “about us” into the Project’s instructions.
• Add two or three examples of emails you’ve written that you’re proud of.
• Add any reference material, such as pricing, policies and FAQs.

Now every chat inside that Project starts with that context. No more re-explaining.

Day 4: Run real work through it

Take three real tasks from your week and do them in the Project. When the result isn’t right, don’t start over. Tell Claude what to change: “shorter,” “warmer,” “mention our 30-day guarantee.” Then update the Project instructions with anything you find yourself repeating.

Day 5: Bring in one teammate

Pick the person on your team most likely to enjoy this. Show them the Project, have them run one real task, and ask what felt confusing. Their questions will tell you exactly what to cover when you roll it out to everyone.

By the end of the week

You’ll have one working Project, a reusable description of your business, and one teammate who gets it. That’s a real foundation, and much further than most teams ever get.

If you’d like help building this out across your whole team, that’s exactly what Claude setup is for.