Claude has quietly become one of the most powerful AI tools. Its most surprising and useful feature launched this summer: Projects. I can now train Claude to assist me with anything Iām working on by uploading up to 500 pages of my relevant notes, files, and examples.
How to use Claude Projects
Step 1. Upload contextual materials. After initiating a new project I can provide examples of my past work, outlines, notes, interview transcripts, past feedback, or whatever else might help ensure the relevance and usefulness of AI replies. Acceptable file types include pdf, docx, csv, txt, html, odt, rtf and epub, or pasted-in text.
Note on privacy. Anthropic, which operates Claude, doesnāt train its models on the material you upload or your prompts. Hereās the policy summarized simply. Exceptions to this arise if material you submit is flagged for safety or trust review, or if you give a response a thumbs up or down. Thatās one reason I donāt use the thumbs up/down feature to rate Claudeās responses.
Step 2. Set custom instructions. I provide Claude with custom instructions for supporting me on the project. I tell it about my context and goals. I specify a role Claude should play. And I detail the desired tone, form, and style of responses Claude should provide in response to my prompts.
Note: These overarching project instructions are not specific to any one prompt. They remain part of Claudeās instructions over the course of a long series of iterative queries. But theyāre only for that project, so they wonāt interfere with other projects.
Step 3: Begin prompting. I prompt Claude to assist me, saving time on menial and technical tasks. Claude helps expand the range of creative ideas I consider and ensures I have the bandwidth to do work I couldnāt otherwise do.
Benefits of Claude Projects
Why this is useful. Rather than tossing queries at ChatGPT with just a short prompt to give it context, Claude can tailor its answers based on extensive background materials, past examples, and detailed instructions. That transforms it into a hyper-personalized digital assistant.
I can create as many projects as I need. Itās easy to create separate projects for each area of focus. For example, for a teaching project, I can upload past teaching plans Iāve created, as well as transcripts of presentations Iāve given. For a new volunteering project Iām working on, I can upload my past notes, ideas, outlines, and drafts to help Claude assist me in developing a new multifaceted project plan.
Pricing: Claudeās basic AI is free for anyone to use. You can upload up to five documents to provide context for a prompt, each up to 30mb. Projects, which allow you to upload dozens of documents and allow for custom instructions, require Claude Pro, at $20/month. I spend that on Claude because itās serving as a 24-7 valuable digital assistant for less than what it might cost me to hire someone for an hour.
The team plan costs $25/month/person and requires at least five members, who can then share and collaborate on projects.
Ideas for using Claudeās Projects
Prepare for workshops, classes or meetings youāre leading. Provide background on the class, workshop, or meeting. Explain your objectives, reference examples of past agendas or lesson plans, and summarize of your pedagogical style or preferences. Omit names or any personal details.
Then task Claude with assisting you in generating examples to use in class, in a meeting, or a workshop. Ask it to generate examples of common mistakes so you can show students or colleagues errors to avoid or challenge them to spot the weakness in a sample.
Direct it to help you spot errors, gaps or blind spots in the instructions, handouts, or other materials youāre giving to students or colleagues.
Give it your ideal learning or project outcomes and ask it to assist you in developing lesson or meeting plans, spotting unconscious bias, or clarifying elements of your syllabus.
Invite its help in brainstorming provocative discussion or quiz questions and generating plausible wrong answers to save you time.
Ask it to assist with outlines for slide presentations.
Prompt it to give you intriguing analogies, jokes, or anecdotes to help you prepare engaging, interactive sessions.
Ask it to give you a dozen alternative ways to explain complex terms.
Use it to generate translations for students or colleagues who might benefit.
Task it with helping you develop accessible materials and activities for learners with different kinds of mental or physical challenges.
Tip: Ask it to generate multiple possible approaches and instruct it to be surprising, creative, and to create intriguing, unexpected materials. (If you missed last weekās post, here are terrific teaching tools).
Get assistance on hobby projects. Whether youāre putting together an outline for fan fiction, a visitorās guide to your plant collection, or an onboarding guide for a new volunteer or club member, you can save hours with Claudeās project assistance. Generate a choose-your-own adventure game, or have it assist you in designing a new language. Dream big.
Plan a team initiative. Provide Claude with notes, goals, deadlines, project context and any other relevant documents. Prompt it to assist you in creating detailed project plans, timelines, memos, step-by-step task lists and more.
Tip: Remind Claude to ask questions whenever it needs additional information to provide targeted, useful responses. Give it feedback after its initial responses to push it in whatever direction you need.
30+ more ways to use Claude Projects
I created a project with Claude so it could help me dream up a collection of ideas for surprising ways to use Claude Projects. (A project about projectsš¬)
Prompting Tips
In addition to uploading relevant documents, provide detailed instructions about the kinds of responses that will be useful for you. For example, if you set up a project to assist you with a professional development workshop for career changers, specify the potential range of skill and knowledge levels of likely attendees so Claudeās responses will be relevant. Additional tips:
Define your target tone. Ask Claude to adopt a casual tone or to be concise and direct, or to use whatever style or language you prefer.
Assign a role. Ask Claude to respond from the perspective of an expert in your industry or job, or have it role play someone facing challenges youāre aiming to address.
Remind Claude to go slow. For complex tasks with multiple facets, tell Claude to "think step-by-step" and direct it to "explain your reasoning.ā That guides the model to fully account for the materials and contextual details youāve shared.
Learn more about Claude
Anthropicās own guide to Claude
My previous post on creative ways to use Claude
A 1-min video example ā how Claude can be useful for a team
Anthropicās own prompt generator, prompt library and prompt tutorial
Caveats
Claude canāt generate images like ChatGPT Pro or Microsoftās free Copilot.
The steep $20/month charge may only be worthwhile if you use Projects extensively. Claudeās top model is already available, for limited use, in its free plan. So if youāre just interested in occasional isolated queries, thereās no need to pay.
You canāt upload links into Claude as you can with some AI tools that will parse them for you. Nor can you upload video or audio files, though you can upload transcripts of those files.
Alternatives
NotebookLM is a useful free Google tool that lets you create notebooks with your own documents you can then query with AI. Hereās my guide. Itās a great free alternative to Claude if your goal is to observe patterns in your documents or explore connections with your materials. But Claude provides a richer, fuller chat interaction based on documents you upload than NotebookLM.
Perplexity lets you create Pages based on search queries to organize summary material on topics youāre exploring. Helpfully, the information you curate in Pages includes citations, so you can trace the info back to its original sources. Rather than deriving these pages from your own material, though, Perplexityās Pages assist you in organizing information itās provided through its AI-powered searches. Read my take on Perplexity.
ChatGPT Plus, the pro version of ChatGPT, is also priced at $20/month. The paid subscription allows you to create your own Custom GPTs. [Hereās my post on Custom GPTs]. These are basically miniature bots you can train with your own files and custom instructions, much like you can train Claude with Projects. You donāt need any knowledge of code ā you can create a bot with natural language instructions. And an advantage of ChatGPT Plus is it also includes an excellent image generation engine. But Claude Projects are a little easier to understand and to use.
How did you feel about this post?
š Liked it. I found this post useful.
š Not useful or relevant for me.
Partner Message
Volv is a Snapchat-backed social news app that consolidates the most important, viral, and interesting content from around the web into 9-second stories that you can just scroll through like social media.
Users call it āTikTok for smart peopleā since they use Volv instead of TikTok and Instagram to discover quality content that they wouldāve never read otherwise. So far, users have read 60 million stories on Volv.
Get Volv Premium free for a month with code VOLVWT
Iāve been using Claude projects for the past couple of weeks and love it. I was a bit stumped when it came to the custom instructions so thanks for clarifying that!
This looks incredible. I use Chat GPT and other apps but not used Claude. As a teacher is Claude the better option as it sounds like it is. Thank you so much, your posts are so good.