Why I Use Claude Projects "Wrong" (On Purpose)

0:00 We need to talk about projects in Claude Co-work. So many of you have asked me about this. How are you using the native project function in Claude? And I have to say I'm not. I think most of us are

0:13 using the Claude project system wrong. And this is how to use it right. This is a super quick video that will unlock your co-work system to use projects so much better. So, in this video, I'm

0:25 going to show you the difference between cloud projects, local projects, and projects in my Cowwork OS system that have their own setup and memory and outputs and everything, which I think is

0:37 a much better solution. Now, first off, if you haven't seen it, you should check out my recent video on how I'm syncing my entire system across mobile, desktop, and browser so that my co-work setup

0:48 lives between connectors, skills, and a Dropbox synced co-work folder. The reason for this is it means that my entire system, instructions, projects, everything can be accessed everywhere,

1:00 including on the new co-work system. Now, I've had lots of people ask me, "How should we use projects?" If you've got your own project system in the co-work app, well, my old answer

1:11 used to be this, and it's still this if you just want to run co-work on your computer with a kind of collected folder system. So, my old option would be to tell you to start a new project, find

1:22 the folder. So, if you want to keep it completely local, you would open up the browser, go to your co-work folder. I'd find commercial and let's say it was going to be the um Agentic Business

1:36 course content project. I'd open this and it would link to it and it would remain local, right? And then you can add files and other instructions into it. I don't want to do that anymore

1:45 because it means I can't access it elsewhere. And it means that on the mobile app we can go into projects and we can't see it. It's not there because it's local, right? You can only see the

1:56 cloud version. So therefore, if I was creating a new project from scratch today, this is what I would do. I would start a new project. This is a set of sessions to work on improving, planning,

2:08 and developing my Gentic Business Accelerator. Follow your claw.md file for full setup and information. So this tells it just to read the usual roots and I can create the project. Now, what

2:20 you'll see is I've not given it any context. It's just got basic instructions and all I would do here then is just set conversations happening here. Just grouping them. To be honest

2:29 with you, that's fine because it means that on mobile here now I can see it turns up and I can add files and work from it. I can star it. So on so forth. Just want to test your instructions.

2:39 Please find the folder you think we should be working in. Now, I'm tricking you here because what you'll see is this just reveals that my system when it's working on the cloud is has a backup,

2:48 which is if it can't find the folder locally, it will do it through the Dropbox connector. And that means that I could do that exact question on the mobile and it would do the same thing.

2:58 But weirdly, still we're not seeing the chat turn up here, right? So, this is another limitation of projects. If you start it on the desktop, it doesn't turn up in the projects folder of the mobile

3:09 app. So, who knows what's going on there. It's kind of weird. If we then having set the project up without the context here, just add the folder here. Course content project. It has now added

3:22 that information. What have we done so far in this project? And you'll see this time it's reading it locally because I've linked it locally, but it's not permanent. And you'll also see that the

3:31 context is only on the computer. It's linked to this computer. So, if we go back to co-work, you can see it, but you can't see the chats. So all of this has led me to go well if you want to use

3:42 this I would simply use it to group conversations. You can see it's reading the context of the files. It started by reading the claude MD and then it worked into the actual system. So that's all

3:53 nice. I mean let me know what you make of this. But I don't find these to be that helpful. I run my system in the co-work tab under home which is now changed with a single folder that I'm

4:04 linked to and I star it like this so that it's always the default and that is my co-work folder found locally offline it does mean that on mobile connect I can use connectors to read the files too

4:16 and what I would normally do is ask it to just work on a project so I would just say what projects do we have live in the commercial work area and the context is the top level folder right

4:26 and it will just read through find the project and then it will be able to go into work areas into commercial and see all the projects and each project itself then of course has a memory file and a

4:38 project brief or instructions and memory. And while it does that, if we go back to the projects folder, if you see here, projects itself gives you the option to add instructions that will

4:51 work alongside with your project instructions and memory where it will kind of naturally do the memory work for you. You can even add scheduled tasks that link to the project, but I've

5:00 already got those. This is the alternative. Let's work on my Aentic Business Accelerator course planning. Where are we at? I'm just in co-work in the main chat. And sure, it's not

5:11 filtering them by project, but how often do you come back to sessions? If you are saving things directly into the project memory and project brief, which you do at the end of each session, that should

5:22 be the habit. You just say, "Okay, great. Let's just save a note and update the project brief. You're good. And you can find it here directly. Now, it might take a few more tokens to find them and

5:34 work through it. Like, it's obviously reading all my basic setup, my about me files, and uh it's reading all the writing rules. It's kind of setting itself up. But then the quality of what

5:43 I get is so much better. It uses the full system and I know that I'm working on a folder level uh to be able to read all the information and work from it. Here we are working in a project with

5:54 really clear memory and setup. The other thing about using OS setup like this where everything is just in the folders that you're not relying on the co-work projects tabs and doing all of this

6:06 stuff. It has one really big distinct advantage. This entire setup is a single folder. And what that means is if you wanted just to go actually I now want to go and run my system llm agnostic on a

6:18 different platform you can just change the name to agent MD of your top level file or soulm of your top level file whatever it is that you use your system with so it knows what that first file is

6:31 it should read and it will just kind of work. Now, I love Anthropic and Claude. It's really fantastic, but the Chinese models caught up big time with the US ones. Kimmy K is now really quite close

6:45 to the frontier models in the US. That is why I recommend keeping your instructions, memory, and systems in your files and use projects to only group chat sessions. You can download my

6:57 Cowwork OS templated system at bettercreating.com. And you want to check out this video next for why I think Notion and Claude are the perfect combination for your context layer and

7:08 business setup. Or this one for how to sync your Claude setup across multiple devices. It's fantastic. I'm loving it. Get subscribed if you haven't and I'll see you on the next one. Bye.