Get Claude AI Working the Way You Do: Our 15-Minute Setup Guide

Why ten minutes of setup changes everything

Most people open Claude, type a question and judge it on the first answer they get back. That answer is usually fine, but it is generic, because Claude knows nothing about you. It doesn’t know what your business does, who your customers are, whether you write in British or American English, or that you hate long-winded replies. So you end up repeating the same background in every chat, and correcting the same things again and again.

The fix is a short setup session. Spend ten to fifteen minutes on the settings below and Claude starts every conversation already knowing who you are, how you like to work and what you sound like. The difference in the quality of the output is noticeable from day one, and it builds over time as Claude learns more about your work.

This guide walks through the five settings worth doing first: your profile, memory, a custom writing style, choosing the right model, and organising your work into projects. Menu names in Claude do move around from time to time, so if a label looks slightly different on your screen, look for the nearest match.

Step 1: Tell Claude who you are

Your profile is the single most useful setting in Claude, and the one most people leave blank. It holds a short description of you and your work that Claude reads at the start of every conversation. Think of it as the briefing you would give a new member of staff on their first morning: what the business does, what you are responsible for, who you sell to, and how you like things done.

To set it up:

1. Click your name or initials in the bottom-left corner of Claude and open Settings.
2. Go to the Profile
3. Fill in what Claude should call you and what best describes your work.
4. In the box that asks what personal preferences Claude should consider in responses, write a few short paragraphs about you and your business.
5. Save your changes. They apply to every new conversation from then on.

What should go in that box? Keep it to things that are true for almost everything you do. A good profile usually covers:

• Your role and business: what the company does, its size, where it operates and your part in it.
• Your customers: who you sell to and what they care about.
• Your services or products: the main things you offer, in plain terms.
• How you want answers: for example British English, short and direct, no jargon, bullet points only when they help.
• Things to avoid: words you dislike, phrases that sound too salesy, or habits that annoy you.

Aim for a few hundred words at most. Your profile loads into every chat, so anything that only matters for one client or one job is better kept in a project (see Step 5). If you are not sure where to start, open a new chat and ask Claude to interview you: “Ask me questions, one at a time, so you can write my profile preferences.” Then paste the result into the box and edit it until it sounds right.

Step 2: Switch on memory

Your profile is what you choose to tell Claude. Memory is what Claude picks up for itself as you work. With memory switched on, Claude saves useful details from your conversations as you go: the clients you mention, the projects you’re running, a deadline that moved, the way you like reports laid out. The next time you start a chat, it already knows. It is the difference between working with a temp who starts fresh every morning and a colleague who remembers last week.

Memory is on by default for Free, Pro and Max plans. On Team and Enterprise plans an account owner has to allow it first, and then each person switches it on for themselves. It’s worth checking either way:

1. Open Settings and go to Your Claude (on older layouts this is called Memory).
2. Turn on Memory from chats (older layouts call it Generate memory from chats).
3. Turn on Search and reference chats so Claude can look back through earlier conversations when you ask it to (paid plans only).
4. Click Manage next to Your memory to see what Claude has saved so far.

You stay in control of what it keeps. The memory page lists everything Claude has saved as a set of topics, and you can edit or delete any of them. You can also manage it from inside a chat by simply saying “remember that we’ve switched suppliers” or “forget the old pricing”. By default Claude won’t store sensitive personal details such as health or religious beliefs, and some things, like bank account numbers and ID numbers, are never saved even if you ask.

For confidential work, you have two options. An incognito chat (the ghost icon at the top of a new chat) isn’t saved to your history or memory at all. Or you can keep a normal chat but switch memory off just for that conversation from the + menu before you send your first message. Projects, covered in Step 5, also have their own separate memory, which helps keep one client’s details apart from another’s.

Step 3: Teach Claude to write like you

Out of the box, Claude writes in a polished, fairly neutral voice. That is fine for internal notes, but it rarely sounds like your business, and readers are getting better at spotting text that reads like AI. A custom style fixes this. You give Claude examples of your own writing, it studies the tone, sentence length and vocabulary, and saves the result as a style you can switch on whenever you write anything people will read.

To create one:

1. Open a new chat and click the + button in the message box.
2. Choose Use style, then Create & edit styles.
3. Click Create custom style.
4. Select Add writing example and upload or paste three to five pieces you’re proud of: emails, blog posts, proposals or web copy written by you, not by a tool.
5. Click Create style, check the preview Claude generates, and give the style a clear name such as “Company blog” or “Client emails”.
6. Next time you write, pick that style from the same menu.

If you would rather spell out the rules, choose Describe style instead and then Use custom instructions (advanced). This is a good place for a short “never do this” list: words you never want to see, phrases that sound like a sales brochure, a preference for British spelling, or a ban on exclamation marks. Many people end up with a few styles: one for blog posts, one for client emails and one for social media. Start with one, use it for a week, and tweak it whenever you catch yourself making the same edit twice.

Step 4: Pick the right model for the job

Claude isn’t one model but a family, and you choose which one answers you from the model picker in the message box. The bigger models think harder and handle more complex work, but they also use up your plan’s usage allowance much faster. If you run everything on the most powerful model by default, you will hit your limit sooner and often wait longer for answers you didn’t need it for. A good rule of thumb is to start with Sonnet and only step up when a task genuinely needs it.

Which models you see depends on your plan. The free plan includes Haiku and Sonnet, while Pro and above add Opus and Fable along with more headroom (Anthropic’s model guide). You can switch model part way through a conversation, which is a handy trick: draft with Sonnet, then switch to Opus for a final review of something important.

The picker also has an Effort setting that controls how much thinking Claude does before it answers. Leave it on the default for most work, turn it down for quick jobs to save allowance, and save the highest setting for your hardest problems.

Step 5: Give each client or job its own project

Once Claude knows about you, the next step is helping it keep your work organised. If every task happens in one long stream of chats, details from different clients start to blur together and you spend time re-uploading the same documents. Projects solve this. A project is a dedicated workspace with its own instructions, files and memory, so everything Claude needs for one client, product or piece of work lives in one place.

A tidy way to start is to create a folder on your computer called Claude, with a subfolder for each client or project inside it. Drop the relevant documents in: briefs, proposals, meeting notes, email chains, brand guidelines, price lists. Then connect it to a project:

1. In the Claude desktop app, find Projects in the left-hand menu and click +.
2. Choose Use an existing folder and select the subfolder you made. (You can also start from scratch, or import a project you already have.)
3. Give the project a clear name, such as the client or job name.
4. Add instructions: a few lines on what the project is, who it’s for, what the end goal is and any rules to follow, such as tone of voice or things never to mention.
5. Click Create, then start your first task inside the project.

A useful first prompt is simply: “Set up this project folder. Read what’s in it, then create a short instructions file and a memory file summarising the project, so you can pick up where we left off next time.” Claude will usually create a couple of markdown files, often named something like CLAUDE.md and MEMORY.md, that it reads at the start of later tasks. If it creates more structure than you need, just tell it to simplify. From then on, keep adding new material to the folder as the work progresses, and Claude stays up to date.

Project memory is kept separate from other projects, which helps with client confidentiality. If you want a project to ignore your general account memory too, turn off Use account memory under Memory on the project’s page. On Team and Enterprise plans, projects can also be shared with colleagues so everyone works from the same instructions and files.

Your 15-minute setup checklist

• ☐ Profile filled in with your role, business, customers and how you like answers
• ☐ Memory and chat search switched on, and saved memories checked
• ☐ At least one custom writing style created from your own writing
• ☐ Sonnet set as your everyday model, with Opus kept for complex work
• ☐ A Claude folder created, and your first client or job set up as a project

None of these settings are fixed. The best setups evolve: you notice Claude getting something wrong, you add a line to your profile or style, and it doesn’t happen again. Revisit your profile every month or two, and tidy your memory if anything is out of date.

Once the basics are in place, the next step is to give Claude new abilities with skills: ready-made sets of instructions for specific jobs such as copywriting, design reviews or code checks. Our companion guide, How to Install Claude Skills and Build Your Own Custom AI Skills, walks through how to find, check and install them.