Most people open Claude, type a question, and treat it like a smarter search box. The settings that turn it into a teammate who knows your business are sitting right there in the menu, and almost no one opens them. Here are the five that matter, and exactly how to set each one up.
Claude is one of the tools you can use every day and still barely scratch the surface of. The difference between people who say AI saves them hours and people who say it is overhated usually comes down to one thing: setup. The chatbot everyone types into out of the box is the least useful version of it.
When Claude is set up correctly, it stops being a place you go for answers and starts being a teammate who already knows your tools, your business, your voice, and how you like to work. You stop re-explaining yourself in every conversation. You stop copying and pasting between apps. You stop getting generic output that sounds like it was written for no one.
This guide walks you through the five settings and features most people miss. None of them require code, and you can work through all five in about 15 minutes. Do them once and every conversation you have afterward gets better.
Connectors let Claude work inside the apps you already run your business in, instead of sitting in a separate window waiting for you to paste things in. Once you connect a tool, Claude can read from it and act inside it directly.
Open Settings, go to Connectors, and link the tools you use most. A few that change how the day feels:
Connect only what you actually use. Every tool you link is one less place you have to copy information out of and paste back in.
Inside Settings there is a Privacy section, and one option decides whether your conversations can be used to help improve the AI model. This is a personal choice, and it is worth making on purpose instead of leaving on the default.
If you want your conversations to stay on your account and not be used for training, turn off the option to help improve the model. Turning it off does not limit what Claude can do for you. It only changes what happens to your conversations after you have them.
Decide once, set it, and move on knowing your business conversations are handled the way you chose.
This is the setting that does the most work. A Project is a dedicated space where you store instructions and files that teach Claude about your business, your goals, your writing voice, and how you want it to think. Work inside that Project and Claude already knows your context before you type a word.
Create a new Project, name it after your business, and give it a set of custom instructions. Here is a starting point you can paste in and adapt:
You are my in-house AI teammate. Here is what you need to know about my business. I run [describe your business] and I serve [describe your ideal client]. My goals right now are [list your top 2 or 3 goals]. My writing voice is [describe your tone, for example warm, direct, no corporate jargon]. When you help me, I want you to [describe how you want it to think, for example ask clarifying questions before drafting, give me the system not just the answer, and keep everything in my voice]. Always assume this context in every response unless I tell you otherwise.
Add any files that help, such as your brand voice notes, your offers, or examples of writing that sounds like you. From now on, work out of this Project for anything tied to your business.
Claude comes in more than one model, and using the same one for everything is like using a race car to check the mail. Matching the model to the task gives you better answers and faster responses.
The model picker sits right at the top of the chat. Glance at your task, pick the model that fits, and you will feel the difference immediately.
If you find yourself typing the same detailed prompt over and over, that is a Skill waiting to happen. A Skill is a prompt or process you save once so Claude can run it on command, instead of you rebuilding the instructions from memory every time.
Take one thing you do on repeat, such as turning a rough idea into a caption, writing a weekly update, or formatting your notes a certain way. Write the full instructions once, save it as a Skill, and name it something you will remember. After that you trigger it by name and Claude runs the whole process.
Every repeat prompt you turn into a Skill is a small piece of your business that now runs the same way every time, without you holding it all in your head.
Connect your tools, set your privacy, build a Project, choose your model, and save your best prompts as Skills. That is the difference between a chatbot and a teammate. Once Claude is set up this way, it works with the context of your actual business instead of starting from zero every time.
This is exactly the kind of setup we build with founders inside Her AI Systems™, so the AI you use every day actually works like it is on your team.
Open Settings, then Connectors, and link the tools you already use like Gmail, Google Calendar, Notion, Airtable, or Canva. Once connected, Claude can read and act inside those tools directly instead of asking you to copy and paste information back and forth.
Open Settings, then Privacy, and turn off the option to help improve the AI model if you want your conversations to stay on your account and not be used for training. This is a personal choice, and turning it off does not limit what Claude can do for you.
A Project is a dedicated workspace where you store instructions and files that teach Claude about your business, your goals, your writing voice, and how you want it to think. Working inside a Project means Claude already knows your context, so you stop re-explaining yourself in every new chat.
Use a faster, lighter model for quick everyday tasks like short drafts and simple questions, and switch to the most capable model for complex work like strategy, analysis, and long documents. Matching the model to the task gives you better answers and faster responses.
A Skill is a prompt or process you use over and over, saved so Claude can run it on command. Instead of retyping the same detailed instructions every time, you save it once and trigger it by name, which turns your best prompts into repeatable systems.
Free Download
Keep the five-setting checklist next to you while you set up Claude.
Follow along for the next guide
New free guide every Tuesday. Find them first on Instagram, TikTok, or by subscribing to the email list.
Want more?
One new free guide. Every Tuesday. No spam, no fluff, just the systems and prompts I'm building for clients, simplified for you.
Subscribe