Set up Claude: preferences, projects, memory and skills

What you'll see in this lesson

1. Preferences: what Claude should always know

   In Settings you write your instructions for Claude once, and they apply to all your conversations.

2. Styles: change the tone in one click

   Styles adjust how Claude writes depending on the task, and you can create your own from your own texts.

3. Projects: your documents always at hand

   A project brings together its own instructions, knowledge documents and chats, with its own separate memory.

4. Memory and chat search

   Memory summarizes your conversations to give context to new chats; chat search finds specific details.

5. Skills: teach Claude how you work

   A skill is a folder with instructions and resources that Claude loads only when the task needs it.

6. Connectors: Claude inside your apps

   Connectors let Claude read and act in services like Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Slack or Notion.

7. Your own connectors with MCP

   If a service you use has a remote MCP server, you can connect it by pasting its address into a custom connector.

8. The order to get everything ready

   Set things up from general to specific: each layer adds context without repeating what you put in the previous one.

9. Summary: Claude set up for you

   Each setting solves one thing: who you are, how to write, with which documents, what to remember and which apps to work with.