AI Guides › Step-by-step guides
By Nigel Guy · 6 min read
Most people open Claude, type a request, take the first answer and carry on in the same chat for weeks. It feels efficient because nothing is set up, and that is exactly why it underperforms: the chat fills with old material, Claude gets the same background re-explained badly each time, and you end up letting it make judgement calls that were yours. The fix is seven things to stop doing, each with a replacement.
The rule: give Claude a small, clean, well-labelled amount of context for one job at a time, and keep every decision and every fact-check on your side of the desk.
Anthropic's documentation says more context is not automatically better: as the amount of text grows, accuracy and recall degrade, which it calls context rot. In the apps, older material may also drop out of view on a rolling basis. A chat that has carried six topics is a worse working environment than a fresh one.
Replace it with a simple habit: one chat, one job. When the job changes, click new chat. If you need to carry something over, ask Claude at the end of the old chat for a short summary of decisions made and open questions, then paste that into the new chat.
If you paste the same background ("I run a small bakery in Leeds, keep the tone warm, never use jargon") into every chat, you are doing a computer's job and you are doing it inconsistently.
Menu labels move around, so if something above looks different, search the Projects help article on support.claude.com rather than guessing.
A 40-page document pasted whole, when you need one section, adds noise. Paste the section, or say which pages matter. For project knowledge, keep the files you actually use. Three clean files beat thirty stale ones, and a stale pricing sheet will be quoted back to you with confidence.
Claude will answer with whatever it assumes. Make it ask first. This is the one line to paste at the end of any substantial request, or into your project instructions:
Before you answer, ask me up to five questions about anything you would otherwise have to assume. If a fact is not in what I have given you, say "not provided" instead of filling it in. Then answer, and end with a list of the assumptions you made.
Fill in nothing; paste it as it is. The "not provided" instruction matters: it turns silent guesses into visible gaps.
Claude is good at laying out options, drafting and critiquing. It does not know your cash position, your client's temperament or what you will regret. Use it like this: ask for three options with the strongest case against each, then choose yourself and write one sentence of reasoning. If you cannot write the sentence, you have not decided yet.
Keep with you, always: anything that commits money, anything legal or medical, hiring and firing, and anything that goes out under your name unread.
Anthropic's own help centre warns that Claude can produce incorrect or misleading answers and should not be your single source of truth, especially for high-stakes advice. When Claude uses web search, open the original pages, because the summary can drop context.
Make a habit of marking each factual claim in an output as checked or unchecked before you use it. Names, figures, dates, quotations and legal or tax points are the usual offenders.
Memory is on by default for Free, Pro and Max accounts at time of writing. It saves topics from your chats so later chats start informed. Controls sit under Settings > Memory: "Search and reference chats" and "Generate memory from chats", plus a separate option for sensitive topics. You can also switch memory off for a single chat from the "+" menu before sending the first message, and incognito chats are not saved to memory or history on any plan.
Decide deliberately. Use memory for stable preferences. Use an incognito chat for anything sensitive or for a clean test where old context would colour the answer.
The trap is a well-built project that quietly goes stale. Instructions written in March describe a business that has changed by October, and Claude will follow them faithfully. Put a monthly reminder in your calendar to reread the project instructions and delete outdated files. The second trap is believing the setup replaces your judgement; it only lowers the cost of using it.