Set up Claude for your life, not your job

My wife asked me to help her get hers set up. I use this stuff every single day and I still watched her get stuck three times in ten minutes. Not because it is hard. Because nobody tells you which three things actually matter, and everything written about this is written for people at work.

1. Start with the right one

There are two things with the word Claude on them and they are not the same product. This is where most people lose twenty minutes before they have typed anything.

Here is the whole decision, in one question. Do you want an answer, or do you want a file?

An answer is something you read, decide on, and move past. Help me word this text. What do I do with three chicken breasts and no plan. Is this email as rude as I think it is. That is Claude. Get the phone app, sign in, done.

A file is something that still has to exist tomorrow. A website. A spreadsheet you keep. An app. That is Claude Code, and it opens inside a folder on a computer and assumes you are building something. If what you wanted was help planning a birthday party, it is the wrong tool and it will feel wrong the entire time.

For your life, it is Claude. Almost always. I use both, but I lean on the other one because nearly everything I make is a file. Websites, sure, but also the apps and tools I build for myself, the lead lists I work from, and the whole filing system this guide came out of. None of that survives a conversation ending, so it has to live in a folder.

There is a second reason I stay over there, and it is worth knowing even if you never touch it. I did not want two memories. If I keep some things in one place and some things in another, I end up as the go-between, carrying facts back and forth and re-explaining the same thing twice. One brain that has everything beats two that each have half. That is a real reason to pick a side and stay on it. It is just that for most people, the side to pick is the easy one.

One more thing to skip: do not go read about which model to pick. The one it gives you is the good one.

2. Make it remember you

This was the part that actually annoyed her, and she was right to be annoyed. She explained her whole situation, got a great answer, came back the next day, and it had no idea who she was. So she explained it again. That is not a helper. That is a stranger who is good at advice.

Two settings fix it forever, and there is a third you should flip while you are already in there.

Turn memory on. It is in settings and it takes one tap. Then tell it the boring facts about your life one time. Where you live. Who is in your house. What you do all day. What you are bad at. It keeps them.

Then go turn training off, in the same sitting. I never show somebody the first switch without showing them this one, and I am not going to start here. You just agreed to hand it your household, your schedule and your money. Before you do that, go into settings, find the privacy section, and look for the control about your conversations being used to improve or train the models. Turn it off.

The exact wording moves around every few months, so do not hunt for a specific sentence. You are looking for the one that decides whether your chats are used for anything beyond answering you. Off is the setting. Memory is you telling it about your life. That other switch is about who else that helps. Those are two different questions and they deserve two different answers.

Make a Project for every part of your life. This is the one my wife actually wanted before she knew it existed. She said she wanted separate folders, one for meals, one for work ideas, one for everything else, so the conversations would stop running together. That is exactly what a Project is. A folder for one subject, with a short note at the top saying what belongs in it.

Meals. Work ideas. The kids. The house. Money. Make one for each. Every conversation you start inside a folder already knows the background, and nothing bleeds between them, so the meal one never starts talking about work.

Do not try to make them perfect. Make three today, add one the next time you notice yourself explaining the same thing twice. The list builds itself if you let it.

This is the same shape I use to run my whole business, minus the file names. Small labeled piles instead of one giant pile. It is the difference between a drawer you can open and a drawer you dread.

Projects are the no-file version of that. If you ever want the version with files, and the reason a pile of notes makes your answers worse instead of better, it is all in the junk drawer guide.

3. Know what to ask it

This is the one nobody admits to. The setup works, the box is sitting there blinking, and you have got nothing. It feels like being handed a microphone.

The trick is that you are not supposed to start from nothing. Bring it something you already have. A photo of the inside of your fridge. The email you do not want to answer. The letter from the school. The screenshot of the bill that does not look right. A blank box is hard. A thing you are already holding is easy.

Here is the honest starter list. These are not clever. They are the ones that make somebody go oh, and then keep using it.

Take a picture of what is in the fridge and ask what to make. Paste in the email you are dreading and ask for three replies, from nice to firm. Ask it to explain the thing your doctor said in normal words. Give it your week and ask where the time actually went. Hand it a receipt and ask what you spend the most on. Ask it to plan the trip you keep saying you will plan.

The one trick that beats everything else

Make it ask you questions before it answers. Almost nobody does this and it changes every answer you will ever get out of it.

What to skip for now

Ignore agents. Ignore automations. Ignore anybody using the word workflow at you. Ignore every setting that is not memory. Those are real things and some of them are great, but adding power to a setup that does not know who you are just gets you wrong answers faster.

Three things. Right app, memory on, bring it something you already have. That is the whole setup, and it takes about ten minutes if nobody wastes your first twenty.

If ChatGPT is the one you actually have on your phone, the same moves in that app are in the ChatGPT version of this guide. It has one extra step Claude does not, and it is the one that fixes the "it writes like a press release" complaint.

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