Section 01

Five habits that separate Claude power users from everyone else.

Most professionals use Claude the same way every day: open a new chat, type a question, read the answer, close the tab. It works. But it leaves most of Claude's capability untouched.

Power users operate differently. They have built a small set of habits that compound over time — habits that make every session faster, every output sharper, and every prompt reusable. This course gives you all five.

Context Summary

Prompt Saving

File Format Choice

Settings Memory

Validation Before Sharing

All five in this course

Key insight: None of these habits takes more than 30 seconds to apply. The compound effect of using all five consistently is what separates professionals who get outstanding results from those who get average ones.

The most expensive mistake in Claude is losing a productive session. You built context over 20 messages, Claude understood exactly what you needed — and then you closed the tab. Next time, you start from zero.

The Context Summary habit solves this permanently.

Key insight: A context summary is not a transcript. It is a structured handover note — the minimum Claude needs to pick up exactly where you left off in a new conversation.

Habit 01 — The Context Summary

At the end of any productive session, before you close the tab, ask Claude to distil everything into a reusable summary. Paste it at the start of your next conversation and continue without rebuilding.

Use this prompt at the end of any session

Summarise this conversation into a context summary I can paste into a new chat. Include: the goal we were working on, the key decisions made, the context I gave you, and where we left off. Keep it under 200 words.

Without this habit

Open new chat. Re-explain the project from scratch. Re-upload context. Spend 10 minutes rebuilding what Claude already understood.

With this habit

Paste the context summary. Claude is immediately up to speed. Continue from exactly where you left off. Zero setup time.

Habit 04 — Settings Memory

In Claude Settings, you can set your preferences, tone, role and formatting rules once. Claude applies them automatically to every conversation — no need to re-type instructions at the start of each chat.

Where to find it: Click your profile icon → Settings → Preferences. Add your role, your preferred response style and any standing rules. Claude will apply them silently from that point forward.

Two more habits that most professionals skip — and both take under a minute to implement.

Key insight: Your best prompts were not written upfront — they emerged from a conversation. The prompt saving habit captures them before they disappear. The file format habit stops you burning usage on formatting overhead.

Habit 02 — Prompt Saving

After any session that produced great results, ask Claude to reverse-engineer the optimal prompt that would have produced the same output from scratch. Save it. Use it again.

Use this prompt at the end of any great session

Based on our conversation, write me the single best prompt I could use to get the same quality output from scratch in a new chat — with no prior context. Make it complete and self-contained.

Habit 03 — File Format Choice

When uploading documents to Claude, choose .txt or .md over PDF or Word whenever possible. Plain text files use significantly fewer tokens — meaning the same content costs less of your usage limit and leaves more room for Claude's response.

Heavy format

Upload a 20-page PDF. Claude processes formatting, headers, footers, metadata. High token cost. Less room for response.

Light format

Upload the same content as .txt. Claude processes only the words. Lower token cost. More room for a detailed response.

Habit 05 — Validate Before Sharing

Claude sounds confident even when it is wrong. Before sharing any Claude output with a colleague, client or manager, read it as the decision-maker — not as the person who asked for it. Check numbers, check names, check claims. You bring the judgement.

The rule: If the output will be shared, acted on, or built upon — it needs a human check first. A confident-sounding output is not the same as a correct one.