Projects, Memory, and Context

Chat and Cowork share one home for Projects and artifacts: a Project holds the documents, instructions, and history for an ongoing stream of work, and both surfaces can see it. Put your brand guide, tone notes, and standing instructions in the Project once, and every session — chat question or Cowork task — starts already briefed. This is the folder-brief pattern from Module 2, promoted to something persistent.

Claude also has memory: preferences and facts it retains across sessions, like how you sign emails, which spreadsheet conventions you use, who's on your team. Memory handles the small personal calibrations; Projects handle the shared, structural context. Between them, the third context layer is Skills — reusable instruction packs — which get the next lesson to themselves.

The payoff compounds. The first week, you'll explain yourself often. By week four, a bare "draft the usual Monday update" lands correctly formatted, correctly toned, and addressed to the right people — because the context lives in the system instead of in your prompts.