Claude now has three new models: Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5, and Haiku 5.5.
For everyday writing, analysis, and office work, start with Sonnet 5.5. Use Opus 5.5 when the problem requires serious thinking or many difficult decisions. Choose Haiku 5.5 for quick, repetitive tasks.
You can switch models inside Claude.
When you have a complicated business problem, don’t ask Opus for a quick suggestion.
Try: Study this situation carefully. Find the risks I might be missing, compare three possible decisions, and tell me which one you would choose and why.
Haiku 5.5 costs just $0.10 per million input tokens for API prompts up to 100,000 tokens.
Use it for sorting emails, answering common questions, labeling documents, and extracting information. See Haiku pricing.
Give Haiku 100 customer messages to sort. Let Sonnet write responses to important ones. Send the difficult complaints to Opus.
This is a simple way to build a multi-model workflow without making every task expensive.
In Claude Code, type /effort
to change how much reasoning Claude uses.
Choose lower effort for simple jobs and higher effort for complex work. Spending extra thinking tokens on every email or tiny change rarely makes sense.
Open Projects and create separate spaces for your business, research, writing, and personal projects.
Add your documents and instructions inside each Project. Claude can use them when you start new conversations there.
In your Project, open Set project instructions and paste:
Use simple English. Keep answers practical. Check numbers carefully. If important information is missing, tell me instead of guessing.
Add your own rules. You won’t need to repeat them in every conversation.
Upload three pieces of your own writing.
Ask: Study my wording, sentence length, opinions, and tone. Create a writing guide that keeps my natural voice. Don't make it sound professionally polished.
Save that guide in your Project.
If you want a specific report, email, or presentation, upload one you already like.
Tell Claude: Use this as an example of the quality and structure I want. Create something new using my information.
For unclear work, paste:
Before starting, ask me the three questions that would make the biggest difference to the result.
This is especially useful for business plans, presentations, marketing, and complicated research.
Don’t ask Claude to explain how to make a sales report.
Ask: Use this sales file to prepare a finished monthly report with charts, important changes, and recommendations. Make the file editable.
Add one sentence to important tasks:
Consider this finished only when [specific result].
For example, a customer list isn’t finished until every entry has a name, contact information, and source.
Claude’s first answer is often a useful starting point.
Try: Read your answer like a critical editor. Remove weak ideas, improve the examples, and make the useful parts more specific.
Ask: What am I overlooking? Find the strongest argument against my idea. Don't agree with me just to be helpful.
I particularly like this approach for testing business ideas and evaluating expensive decisions.
Upload the spreadsheet, contract, research paper, or customer conversation instead of explaining what it says.
Prompt: Base your answer on these files. Tell me which file supports each important finding.
Add: If you cannot find a price, date, source, or figure, write "Not found." Never fill missing information with an estimate unless I ask.
A very simple rule that can prevent expensive mistakes.
Ask: Research this topic using current sources. Check official websites first. Compare conflicting information and link to the original evidence.
Use Claude’s web research tools when available.
Try: Explain this like you're talking to an intelligent friend who doesn't work in this industry. Use one real example.
This works wonderfully for technical papers, contracts, AI concepts, and business reports.
Upload a failed proposal, rejected application, poor campaign, or unsuccessful project.
Ask: Study what went wrong. Identify the likely reasons and suggest what I should do differently next time.
Open Settings → Memory and review what Claude remembers about your work.
Correct outdated details. You can also ask Claude to remember a useful preference or search your previous conversations. Memory guide.
Keep separate chats for separate jobs.
In Claude Code, /clear
starts fresh and /compact
shortens a crowded conversation while preserving important context. This is useful when long sessions start getting confused.
At the end of a long project, ask:
Write a short handover explaining what we've completed, what decisions we made, and what should happen next.
Save it as handover.md
for your next session.
Use Claude Cowork to work with folders and documents.
Try: Read these invoices, prepare an expense report, and save the finished spreadsheet in the Reports folder. Leave the originals unchanged.
Upload sales or expense data.
Ask: Find duplicate entries, unusual numbers, missing values, and the five most important changes. Explain anything that needs my attention.
Upload a meeting transcript and ask:
Extract every decision, task, responsible person, and deadline. Put them into a simple action tracker. Mark anything unclear.
Open Customize → Connectors and connect supported services such as Gmail, Google Drive, or Slack.
Claude can then use information from those apps without needing you to copy everything into chat. Connector guide.
Once your tools are connected, try:
Check my upcoming meetings, find the related documents in Drive, and prepare a short briefing for each meeting.
A single request can replace several rounds of searching and copying.
With an email connector, ask:
Find unanswered client emails from the last three days. Group them by urgency and prepare reply drafts. Don't send anything.
Review the drafts before sending.
Where browser tools are available, ask:
Visit these five competitor websites, collect their public prices, and prepare a comparison with links to each product.
Always have Claude show where the numbers came from.
Open Customize → Skills and browse the available skills.
Skills teach Claude how to perform specific jobs, such as creating spreadsheets or documents. You can also add your own. Skills guide.
Tell Claude:
Help me create a skill for my weekly business report. It should read sales data, calculate changes, find problems, and follow the same format every week.
Save the instructions as a reusable skill.
Open Customize → Plugins → Discover.
You can find plugins for sales, marketing, finance, research, and other jobs. Add one that fits your work and check its permissions before using it.
In Scheduled, create a recurring task:
Every weekday morning, find important developments in my industry. Prepare a short briefing with source links and explain what deserves my attention.
New cloud-based scheduled tasks can run without leaving your computer on, provided they use cloud-accessible information.
Try scheduling a weekly industry report or competitor check. Local files and apps may still require your computer.
A useful monitoring prompt:
Check these pages for price changes. Report only confirmed changes. If nothing changed, record that the check finished successfully.
You’ll get more useful reports and less unnecessary information.
For recurring tasks, ask:
Keep a simple log showing the date, what you checked, what changed, and anything that failed.
Review the log regularly so unnoticed errors don’t pile up.
Create a file called decisions.md
.
Ask Claude to record important decisions, why you made them, and when they should be reviewed. This gives future projects a useful history beyond the conversation.
Upload notes about your customers, products, competitors, or research.
Prompt: Create a simple relationship map showing how these people, ideas, and products connect. Only include links supported by my documents.
This is a beginner-friendly use of knowledge graphs.
Claude Code can work with files, websites, data, and small applications.
On macOS or Linux, install it from Terminal with:
curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash
Then open your working folder and type claude
.
Inside your project, run /init
.
Claude creates a CLAUDE.md
file for project instructions. Add important rules, folder locations, and the checks it should perform before finishing.
In Claude Code, press Shift+Tab
to enter Plan Mode.
Ask: Study this project and explain what needs to change. Show me the plan before editing anything.
Use this for larger changes rather than tiny fixes.
Inside Claude Code, type @
and select the relevant file.
For example: @app.js Find the reason this page loads slowly. Suggest the smallest safe fix.
Claude can inspect the actual file instead of guessing.
When something breaks, upload the error message or log.
Ask: Find the cause, fix it, and explain what went wrong in simple terms.
The real error usually helps more than a long description of what you think happened.
Claude Code supports specialist subagents.
Ask: Use a separate review agent to inspect the changes. Find possible errors without editing the files.
If a project has independent parts, ask Claude Code to split the work between agents.
For example, one investigates a problem while another reviews tests. Keep their tasks clearly separated so they don’t change the same files.
If you’re building with the Claude API, use prompt caching for large instructions or documents you reuse often.
For thousands of tasks that aren’t urgent, consider the Batch API, which offers lower prices.
Add this instruction to serious tasks:
Before finishing, check your output against the original request. Show which checks passed, which failed, and what you could not verify.
For coding, this can mean running tests. For reports, checking calculations and sources.
Claude can now take many actions that used to require you to open an app and do them yourself.
That makes one final rule especially important:
You can research, organize, calculate, prepare files, and draft messages. Ask for my approval before sending anything, deleting important data, spending money, or making permanent changes.
The more work Claude handles, the more useful this simple boundary becomes.
You don’t have to follow all 48 laws or set up some huge AI system.
Pick the jobs that keep appearing in your day. Give Claude enough information to do them properly, save the instructions that work, and automate the ones you trust.
Even three or four good workflows can make a noticeable difference.
And I think that’s the best way to judge any AI tool now: how much useful work can it actually take off your hands?
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