Claude has memory now, and most people aren't using it. Right now you're starting from scratch every session—explaining who you are, pasting context, getting an answer, then watching it all disappear. The first step is turning on Memory in settings and actually reading what Claude has already learned about you. It generates four sections automatically: Preferences (how you want things done), Profile (who you are and what you work with), Areas (the domains you keep returning to), and People (names that matter in your work). Half of it will be wrong at first, but you fix it by typing plainly into the text box—"I no longer work on X" or "Stop assuming Postgres"—and it updates the entry. Add two things today: what you do and what you're working on this month, plus three things you never want in an output. The real leverage comes from Projects, Skills, and Connectors. Projects aren't just folders—they're places with their own instructions, files, and memory that don't leak into other projects. Create one for every recurring job. Write a four-part brief: what the project is, what good output looks like, the constraints, and what to never do. Skills are methods you do the same way every time: how you research, structure a report, review code. Write them after you've done the task manually twice, not from imagination. Connectors let Claude read from Gmail, Google Calendar, Notion, Slack, GitHub, Linear—all at once, in one sitting. The payoff shows up when several are connected and Claude can move between them: pull a thread from email, check a date in the calendar, write the result into a doc. The workflow changes after this. Scheduled tasks run in the cloud whether your laptop is on or not—set up a morning inbox digest, a Friday summary of what changed in your docs and repos, a weekly pass over unfinished notes. When Claude writes something long, you don't rewrite the whole thing; highlight the part you want changed, type what should be different, and it rewrites that section only. Ask for files instead of answers—the spreadsheet with formulas already in it, not numbers to paste. If you work in Excel or PowerPoint, install the add-ins and stop moving files back and forth. Claude sits in a side panel and edits the open document while keeping the conversation context, and your skills apply there too, so formatting rules you wrote once hold everywhere.