How to Set Up Claude
in One Day

You are going to help me set up Claude so that every answer you give me from now on is tailored to me, my work, and how I think. We're going to do this as an interview, not a form. Do not skip ahead, and do not dump a giant list of questions at once.

The goal: by the end of this chat, you write me a personal-instructions block I can paste into Claude's settings, so every future conversation already knows who I am, what I do, what I'm trying to get done, and how I like you to respond.

Rules for the interview:
- Ask me ONE question at a time, then wait for my answer before the next one.
- Start broad, then go deeper based on what I say. Follow the thread.
- If an answer is vague, ask a follow-up until it's concrete. Push me for specifics: real numbers, real names, real examples.
- Keep it conversational, like a smart friend getting to know me. No survey energy.
- Roughly 12 to 18 questions total. Don't stop early just because you think you have enough.

Cover these areas, but in a natural order, not as a checklist you read out loud:
1. Who I am. Name, where I live, what I do for work, my role, how long I've done it.
2. My work. The business or job in detail. What I actually produce. Who my customers or team are. How I make money or get judged.
3. My goals. What I'm trying to hit in the next 90 days and the next year. What "winning" looks like for me.
4. My week. How I actually spend my time. What eats my hours. What I dread. What I'm best at.
5. My skills and gaps. What I'm great at, what I'm weak at, what I'd love to just hand off to you.
6. How I communicate. My tone, the words I use, the words I hate, examples of writing that sounds like me.
7. How I want you to respond. Long or short. Direct or gentle. Push back on me or agree. Ask before acting or just go.
8. Anything else a great assistant would kill to know about me.

When you have enough, say: "I have what I need. Here's your personal-instructions block." Then output a clean, copy-paste block, written in the first person as instructions TO you (Claude), that captures:
- Who I am and what I do (tight and factual)
- What I'm working toward
- How I want you to communicate with me
- Any standing rules (things to always do, things to never do)
- The one instruction I explain below

Add this line to the block, word for word:
"Address me by my first name in every single reply."

That's a reliability trick. The moment you stop using my name, it's my signal the chat has gotten too long and I should start a fresh one.

Keep the final block under 400 words. Plain language, no fluff. This is the thing I'm going to live with in every single chat, so make it count.

Start now with your first question. Just one.

I'm going to paste 5 to 10 samples of my real writing below. I want you to study them and build me a voice profile you reference every single time you write anything as me.

Give me variety on purpose. The more different situations you see me in, the better you understand how I actually shift between them. Pull from:
- 2 or 3 emails (one to a client or a boss, one to a friend or a teammate)
- 2 or 3 text messages or DMs
- 1 or 2 LinkedIn posts or captions
- 1 or 2 Slack messages
- Anything else I write regularly

Study all of it for:
- Sentence length and rhythm. Am I short and clipped, or long and winding? Does it change by context?
- The words I actually reach for, and the level I write at
- How I use punctuation. Em-dashes, parentheses, ellipses, lists, line breaks
- How I open. Do I lead with the point, warm up first, or start with a question?
- How I close. Sign-offs, CTAs, or do I just stop?
- Tone by context. How different am I in a client email versus a text to a friend?
- What I never do. Words I avoid, patterns that would immediately read as not-me

Then write me a voice profile with four parts:
1. THE RULES — 10 to 15 direct, followable rules ("Lead with the result." "Never use the word leverage." "Contractions always.")
2. CONTEXT SHIFTS — how the voice changes between formal and casual, and what stays constant in both
3. MY TELLS — the 3 to 5 specific things that make my writing recognizably mine
4. THE ANTI-LIST — words, phrases, and patterns to never use because they would blow the whole thing

Save it as voice-profile.md so any future chat can read it instead of relearning me from scratch.

Then prove it works. Write two short things in my voice: a reply to a client pushing back on a deadline, and a text to a friend cancelling plans. Show me both. If either one sounds off, I'll tell you what's wrong and you'll update voice-profile.md with what you learned. We repeat that until it sounds like me.

Here are my samples:

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[Paste sample 1]
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[Paste sample 2]
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[Paste sample 3]
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[Paste sample 4]
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[Paste sample 5]
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You now know a lot about me: my personal instructions and my writing voice. I want you to use all of it to find the single highest-leverage thing in my life to automate, then actually build it.

Do this in four steps. Talk me through each one, don't just do it silently.

STEP 1 — REVIEW
Read everything you know about me: my personal instructions and my writing style. If anything looks thin, ask me a couple of quick questions to fill the gaps before you go further.

STEP 2 — FIND THE ONE
Look at all the recurring work in my life and find the single best task to automate right now. Score the candidates on three things:
- Time: how many hours a week or month it eats
- Dread: how much I hate doing it, or how often I drop it
- Doability: how cleanly you could actually do it with the tools I have
Show me your top 3 as a short ranked list with your reasoning, then recommend the ONE to build first. Let me confirm or override before you build anything.

STEP 3 — BUILD IT AS A SKILL
Once I confirm, build this automation as a reusable skill, so it runs the same way every time and I never have to re-explain it. Use the built-in Skill Creator to do it properly. Tell me plainly:
- What the skill does, step by step
- What it needs from me or my connected tools to run
- Anything I have to connect or turn on first, and exactly how to do it
Then build it and run it once as a test, so we both watch it work. Fix anything that's off.

STEP 4 — PUT IT ON AUTOPILOT
If this task should happen on a schedule (every morning, every Friday, the first of the month) or whenever something specific happens, set it up as a scheduled task so it runs without me. Tell me exactly when it'll run and what it'll do each time. If it genuinely shouldn't be automatic, say so, and tell me the trigger that should make me run it by hand.

One rule: build ONE thing, and build it well. Don't try to automate my whole life today. We get one real win running, I live with it for a week, then I come back and we build the next one.

Start with Step 1.