Your first hour with Claude: the 3 things to do before anything else.

Getting started · 3 minute read

Most people open Claude for the first time, type "write me a poem about my dog," get a poem, and close the tab. Then they tell their friends AI is a toy.

The gap between "toy" and "the most useful thing on my computer" is about an hour, and most of that hour is Claude doing the work. Here are the three things to do first, in order.

1. Turn memory on

Out of the box, every conversation starts from zero. You explain your job, your project, your weird schedule, and next session it is all gone. Memory fixes that, but you have to flip the switch.

Click your initials in the bottom corner, open Settings, and look for Memory (on some plans it lives under a section called Capabilities or Features). Turn it on. That is it. From now on, Claude carries forward what matters about you between conversations.

Why do this first? Because everything else in this guide gets saved. If you do it last, the best hour of setup evaporates when you close the window.

2. Run the interview prompt

Do not start by telling Claude about yourself. You will forget the important parts. Instead, make Claude interview you. Paste this in:

Before we work together, interview me. Ask one question at a time, about ten questions total. Cover: what I do for work, what I am trying to build or earn this year, which tools I already use, what a normal week looks like, and which tasks keep eating my time. When we finish, write a short profile of me that you can use to make every future answer more specific, and save it to memory.

Answer honestly, including the messy parts. "I keep meaning to send invoices and I do not" is more useful to Claude than any job title. Ten minutes later you have an assistant that knows your situation instead of a search box that knows nothing.

3. Give it one real task

Not a test. Not "tell me a fun fact." Pull up the actual to do list you have been avoiding and hand over the item you dread most. For example:

• "Draft the reply to this client email. Here is what they sent and what I want to say badly."
• "Here is my week. Tell me what to do first and what to drop."
• "I charge $40 an hour and I think it is too low. Interview me about my work, then tell me what to charge."

The first real task matters because it rewires what you reach for. Once Claude has saved you twenty real minutes on a real problem, you stop thinking "chatbot" and start thinking "coworker."

What not to do in hour one

Do not install seventeen browser extensions. Do not watch a three hour tutorial. Do not ask it to build you an app. Memory on, interview done, one real task shipped. That is a genuinely great first hour, and it beats what most people accomplish in their first month.