Part 2 of the Claude Cowork guide for someone who’s super smart but non-technical. Here is Part 1, you don’t need to read part 1 to benefit from this guide.
Before we get started, Hi, I’m Karima Digital, a non technical founder who vibe coded and scaled an app to 60k+ users. I teach super smart people who are non technical how to take full advantage of AI, after you learn from me you spend more time working ON the business and less time working IN the business.
In Part 1, you hired your AI employee. You set up a folder, built your context files, connected a tool, and gave Claude enough information to actually be useful. That was the onboarding.
But here’s what I didn’t tell you: you set up your employee’s workspace. You didn’t set up yours.
When you opened Cowork and pointed it at your folder, you gave Claude a place to work. That’s their desk. But where do YOU sit? Where do you go when you want to think through a problem with Claude, reference your documents, or have a conversation that actually remembers what you talked about last week?
That’s what Projects are for.
What’s a Project?
You already know Claude the chatbot. You type a question, you get an answer. You know Cowork. You give Claude a task, it goes and does it.
Projects are the third thing. Think of them as specialized workspaces where you and Claude work together. Not a one-off chat or a delegated task. A dedicated space with its own documents, its own rules, and its own memory.
Here’s what a Project gives you:
A knowledge base. Upload files that Claude can reference anytime you’re in that project. Business plans, research, brand guidelines, client briefs, whatever. You upload it once and Claude has it every time you open that project.
Custom instructions. Rules that only apply in this project. Your content project can have one set of rules. Your client research project can have completely different ones.
Conversation history. Every chat you have in a project is saved. You can pick up where you left off, search through old conversations, and build on work you’ve already done.
Memory. Claude actually learns from your conversations and remembers patterns across sessions. The more you work in a project, the smarter it gets.
The key difference between a regular Claude chat and a Project is that a Project remembers. Regular chats are one-and-done. Projects accumulate context over time.
Projects are very similar to custom GPTs, but honestly, they’re way smarter. The biggest downfall is that you cannot make projects public; they only exist in your or your team’s account.
Why Getting Specific Changes Everything
Here’s the mistake I see people make: they use Claude the same way for everything. Same chat, same context, same instructions. They’re asking Claude to write a social post, research a competitor, draft an investor email, and plan their kid’s birthday party all in the same conversation.
That’s like asking your employee to be the copywriter, the analyst, the executive assistant, and the party planner at the same time. Nobody’s good at everything all at once.
Projects fix this by letting you specialize.
My projects look something like this:
Content Creation with instructions about my brand voice, my platforms, my posting cadence. The knowledge base has my voice-dna file, my content calendar, and examples of posts that performed well.
Crash Out Diary with instructions about the app’s architecture, our user base, the Schools pilots. The knowledge base has our product docs, user research, and fundraising materials.
AI Power Lab (my AI consultancy business) with instructions for a more professional tone, focused on business outcomes. The knowledge base has client templates, workflow examples, and case studies.
When I open my Content Creation project and say “draft three Threads posts about this topic,” Claude already knows my voice, my platforms, and what kind of content works for me. I don’t have to re-explain any of it. It just knows.
When I switch to my Crash Out Diary project and say “help me outline the investor update email,” Claude shifts into a completely different mode. Different tone, different context, different knowledge base.
Same employee. Different desks. Different expertise.
Set Up Your First Project
This takes about ten minutes. Here’s the process:
Step 1: Create the project
Open Claude (the regular app or claude.ai, not Cowork). Look for Projects in the sidebar. Click to create a new one. Give it a clear name. “Content Creation” not “Project 2.” The name matters because you’ll be switching between projects and you want to know what’s what at a glance.
Step 2: Write your custom instructions
This is the most important part. Custom instructions tell Claude who it is, what the goal is, and how to behave in this specific project. Think of it like writing a universal prompt that loads every time you open the project.
Good custom instructions have three parts:
Role. Who is Claude in this project? Give it a title and a specialty. This shapes how it thinks about every request.
Goal. What are you trying to accomplish together? This keeps Claude focused on the bigger picture instead of just answering one question at a time.
Rules. The specific behaviors, preferences, and operational habits you want Claude to follow. This is where you get detailed.
For a Content Creation project, your instructions might be:
Role: You are my content strategist and ghostwriter.
Goal: Help me create content that grows my audience on Threads, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Always reference the brand-voice file in the knowledge base for my tone, banned phrases, and real writing samples.
Rules:
Always ask what platform this is for before drafting. Each platform needs a different approach.
Show me the draft before finalizing. I always edit the final version myself.
Keep posts short and punchy. No filler. If a sentence doesn’t add anything, delete it.
After every session, update my content calendar in Notion with what we worked on.
For a Client Research project, the instructions would be totally different:
Role: You are my research analyst and client strategist.
Goal: Help me deliver high-quality research and insights that I can share with clients confidently.
Rules:
Use a professional but approachable tone. Not corporate, but not casual either.
Always cite sources with links. I need to verify what you’re telling me.
Lead with the insight, then the supporting data. Don’t bury the conclusion.
If you’re not sure about something, say so. Don’t guess.
Save all final deliverables to the client’s Google Drive folder.
Different project, different role, different rules. The role and goal give Claude direction. The rules keep it in line. And those last rules in each example (updating Notion, saving to Drive) are the ones people miss. They turn your project from a conversation into a workflow.
Step 3: Upload files to your knowledge base
Your context files from Part 1 (about-me.md, brand-voice.md, working-preferences.md) should go in every project. They’re your universal context. Then add project-specific files.
For your Content Creation project: your content calendar, past posts that performed well, platform-specific guidelines, any SOPs for how you create content.
For a Client project: the client brief, their brand guidelines, previous deliverables, relevant research.
You can upload PDFs, Word docs, Excel files, CSVs, images, and more. Each file can be up to 30MB. On paid plans, you get unlimited files and Claude uses RAG (fancy way of saying it searches your docs intelligently instead of trying to load everything into memory at once).
One thing people miss: you can tell Claude to reference specific documents in your custom instructions. “Always check the brand-voice file before drafting” or “Reference the client brief before starting any task.” This way Claude doesn’t just have the files available; it knows which ones to actually look at.
Step 4: Have your first conversation
Open a new chat in the project and test it. Ask Claude something that should pull from your knowledge base and follow your custom instructions.
If you set up a Content Creation project, try: “Draft a Threads post about [topic you’re currently working on]. Use my voice.”
If Claude references your brand voice file, follows your instructions, and sounds like you? It’s working.
Your Desk vs. Their Desk
Now you have two workspaces. Here’s how they’re different:
Projects are where you and Claude think together. You’re at the desk. You’re in the conversation. You’re asking questions, brainstorming, referencing documents, and building ideas. It’s collaborative.
Cowork is where you hand Claude a task and walk away. It reads your files, connects to your tools, and executes multi-step work on its own. You come back to a finished product (or a first draft, at least).
They don’t directly talk to each other yet. That’s the gap. But the bridge is your shared tools. Notion, Google Drive, Gmail. If you plan a content strategy in your Content Creation project, you can capture the output in an md file, Notion doc or Google Doc. Then when you switch to Cowork, Claude can access that same doc through the connector and execute on it.
Here’s how this looks in practice:
In your Content Creation project: “Help me plan next week’s content. I want five Threads posts and two Instagram posts. Here are the topics I’m thinking about.” You go back and forth, refine the plan, Claude references your past performance data from the knowledge base.
Save the plan to Notion or a Google Doc.
In Cowork: “Check my content plan in Notion and draft all seven posts in my voice. Save them as separate files in my content folder.” Claude goes off and does it while you do something else.
Projects for thinking. Cowork for doing. Shared tools for the handoff.
Your Project Remembers You
This is the part that’s new and honestly a little wild.
Claude has a memory feature (it launched for paid users in late 2025 and recently rolled out to free plans too). When you work in a project over time, Claude starts remembering patterns from your conversations. Not just what’s in your knowledge base or your instructions. Things it picks up from working with you.
After a few sessions in your Content Creation project, Claude might remember that you prefer bullet-style posts on Threads but paragraph-style on LinkedIn. Not because you put it in your instructions, but because it noticed the pattern from your feedback.
Think of it like this: instructions are what you tell your employee. The knowledge base is the reference material on their desk. Memory is what they learn from working with you.
Between all three, your project becomes something that actually understands your work. Not in a creepy way. In a “this employee has been paying attention” way.
Set Up Your Projects: Three Prompts to Get You Started
Instead of a setup file this time, I’m giving you three prompts. Each one is designed for a specific type of project. Create the project in Claude, paste the prompt into your first conversation, and Claude will interview you and build your custom instructions.
Prompt 1: Content Creation Project
I just created a new Claude project for content creation and I need your
help writing the custom instructions. Interview me first. Ask me these
questions one at a time:
1. What platforms do you create content for?
2. Describe your brand voice in a few sentences. How do you sound?
3. What kind of content do you create most often? (Posts, articles,
newsletters, videos, carousels?)
4. What does your content creation process look like right now?
5. What should the AI always do before drafting content for you?
6. What should it never do? What makes content sound like AI and not you?
7. Are there any formatting rules or preferences?
After the interview, write custom instructions I can paste into this
project's settings. Keep them as short, direct rules. No essays.
Prompt 2: Client or Research Project
I just created a new Claude project for client work and research. Help me
write the custom instructions by interviewing me. Ask these one at a time:
1. What kind of clients or research do you do?
2. What's the tone for this work? Professional, casual, somewhere specific?
3. When you research something, how do you want findings presented?
(Summaries, bullet points, full reports, something else?)
4. What should always be included? (Sources, citations, data, recommendations?)
5. What should the AI do before starting any research or client task?
6. What are your pet peeves with AI-generated research?
7. Any specific formats or templates you like to use?
After the interview, write custom instructions for this project.
Short, direct rules I can paste into the project settings.
Prompt 3: Business Operations Project
I just created a new Claude project for running my business operations.
Interview me to build the custom instructions. Ask one at a time:
1. What does your business look like? What are the main areas you manage?
2. What tasks do you do most often for business ops? (Planning, scheduling,
emails, reports, financial tracking?)
3. How do you like information organized? (Bullet points, tables, summaries?)
4. When you delegate a task, what do you need to see before it's done?
5. What should the AI always check or confirm before taking action?
6. What should it never assume or do without asking?
7. How much autonomy should it have? Should it ask before every step,
or just show you the finished product?
After the interview, write custom instructions for this project.
Keep them tight. Rules, not paragraphs.
Let Me Be Real With You for a Second
Like Part 1, here’s what I wish someone had told me. Cowork keeps updating, so some of this might change, but right now:
Projects and Cowork don’t directly sync. This is the biggest limitation right now. You can’t start a conversation in a Project and seamlessly hand it off to Cowork. You’re the bridge. Use shared tools like Notion or Google Drive to pass context between them.
Knowledge base isn’t perfect. Claude can sometimes miss relevant information in large document sets, especially on free plans without RAG. Name your files clearly and reference specific documents when you need Claude to look at something particular.
Memory is still evolving. Claude might remember things you didn’t expect it to, or miss things you thought it would catch. It gets better the more you use it.
Projects work on web and mobile too. Unlike Cowork (desktop only), you can access your Projects from your phone.
Tips From My Setup
Start with two or three projects. Don’t create ten on day one. Pick the two or three types of work you do most often. Get those projects dialed in with great instructions and a solid knowledge base. You can always add more later.
Your Part 1 context files go in every project. Your about-me, brand-voice, and working-preferences files should be in every project’s knowledge base. They’re your universal context. The stuff you add on top is what makes each project specialized.
Write different instructions for each project. This is the whole point. If your content project and your research project have the same instructions, you’re not getting the value of specialization. Think about what makes each type of work different and encode that in the rules.
Name your projects like you’d name folders. Clear, specific, no abbreviations. “Content Creation” not “CC.” “Crash Out Diary Product” not “COD.” You’ll thank yourself when you have six projects and need to find the right one fast.
Use Projects for thinking, Cowork for doing. This is the mental model that made everything click for me. If I need to talk something through, I go to a Project. If I need something built, written, or executed, I go to Cowork. The shared tools (Notion, Drive) are the bridge.
Coming Up Next: Part 3, Setting Up Your Employee’s Workspace
You just set up YOUR desk. You’ve got specialized projects with custom instructions, a knowledge base full of your real documents, and a memory that gets smarter the more you use it.
In Part 3, we’re setting up your employee’s workspace. That’s the Cowork side: global instructions that Claude follows in every session, connecting all your tools so Claude can access your real data, and building a task management system in Notion (or your preferred tool) so Claude actually knows what needs to get done.
If Part 1 was hiring and Part 2 was setting up your office, Part 3 is building your employee’s desk right next to yours (and Part 4 will be focused on your Employee SOPs aka Skills).
I am building this brick by brick and breaking down every detail as much as possible because I really want you to be set up for success. I would greatly appreciate it if you subscribe and comment or share this with a friend if it’s really helped you out.