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Ten Plays You Should Run Immediately

One hour. Ten changes to how Claude works for you. None of them go away.

Keith Eddleman, CTO of Q1Media

Keith Eddleman

CTO at Q1Media · Author of The AI Playbook

You use Claude every day. You type something, you get something back, you move on. That's about five percent of what it does.

I run engineering at a company managing more than fifty million dollars a year in ad spend, and I build with Claude every day. These are the ten things I wish somebody had handed me on day one. No code. No course. Nothing you don't already have.

How to use this

  • Do them in order. Play 1 is the reason the other nine work.
  • Use real work. A test question teaches you nothing. Bring the email you're avoiding.
  • Every prompt is copy-and-paste. All of them are in the appendix at the bottom.

The plays

  1. 01Tell Claude who you are.
  2. 02Stop typing.
  3. 03Make it interview you.
  4. 04Ask what it's missing.
  5. 05Show it. Don't describe it.
  6. 06Don't accept the first draft.
  7. 07Make it convene a board.
  8. 08Let AI do the post-meeting work.
  9. 09Learn to create skills.
  10. 10The Sunday night brain dump.
Ten plays · 14 prompts

01Start here

Tell Claude who you are.

Every generic answer you've ever gotten comes from one place: Claude doesn't know you. It doesn't know your company, your customers, or what a good year looks like. So it writes for a stranger.

Fix that once. Answer ten questions, tell it to remember, and everything after this reads like it came from someone on your team.

I put this off for months. It's fifteen minutes. Do it first.

Prompt
Ask me these ten questions, one at a time. Remember my answers and use them in everything we do from here on.

1. What's my name and what do I do?
2. What does my business do, in one sentence?
3. Who's my ideal customer?
4. What do I sell and what does it cost?
5. How do I talk? Formal, casual, blunt, funny?
6. What am I focused on this quarter?
7. Who's on my team and what does each person own?
8. What tools does my business run on?
9. What should you never do? Words I hate, styles I hate.
10. What does a win look like twelve months from now?

Run it

  1. Open a new chat. Paste the prompt.
  2. Answer all ten. Properly. Out loud if you can — see Play 2.
  3. Before you close the chat, ask: "What do you now know about me?" If it can't answer, it didn't save.

02

Stop typing.

You type about forty words a minute. You talk at a hundred and fifty. Every brief you carefully typed into Claude, you could have said in a quarter of the time.

And the spoken version is better. Claude is built to find the point inside a mess. Your job isn't to be articulate. Your job is to get the thinking out of your head.

I use Wispr Flow. Hold a key, talk, let go. That's the whole setup.

Prompt
This is a brain dump. Turn it into a clear, organized brief. Keep my language where it's good. Cut the rest.

Run it

  1. Install a dictation tool. Wispr Flow is free to start and takes two minutes.
  2. Hold the key and talk about your project like you're venting on a walk. Leave the ums in.
  3. Paste the mess into Claude with the prompt above.

03

Make it interview you.

You give Claude one sentence. It gives you something generic. At some point you decided that's just how it is.

It isn't. A person who asks you zero questions gives generic advice too. Flip the order. Make it ask before it answers.

Prompt
Before you do anything, interview me. Ask the questions you'd need to do this at the highest level. One at a time. Then do the work.

Run it

  1. Pick a real task. A reply to an angry client. A job post. A proposal.
  2. Open with the prompt above instead of the task.
  3. Answer three or four questions properly. Then let it work.

Run the same task cold once so you can see the gap. The gap is the whole lesson.

04

Ask what it's missing.

Play 3's bigger sibling. You're sitting on information Claude needs, and it has no way to ask for it. So ask on its behalf.

This is the two-line prompt I use more than any other.

Prompt
What am I not telling you that would make your output for me ten times better? List it, most important first.

And for the middle of a chat, when the output keeps missing and you can't say why:

Prompt
We're not on the same page. What do you need from me to get this right?

Run it

  1. Open a real chat with some history in it.
  2. Run the first prompt. Read the list. Answer it.
  3. Keep the second one for when a chat starts going sideways.

05

Show it. Don't describe it.

You've been explaining your problems to Claude in words. That's describing a painting over the phone.

Screenshot the thing. The spreadsheet that doesn't add up, the error, the client text you've reread five times. Paste it in.

Prompt
Here's a screenshot. Tell me what's going on and what you'd do about it.

Run it

  1. Screenshot it. Don't clean it up first.
  2. Paste it in with the prompt above.
  3. Ask your follow-up in the same chat. It can see what you see now.

06

Don't accept the first draft.

The first answer is the floor. Almost nobody pushes on it. You read it, think "close enough," and send it. Or you decide Claude is mediocre and quit.

Same mistake, both directions. You've been treating it like an assistant who needs encouragement. Treat it like the best hire you've ever made — the kind who does their best work when you hold the bar high.

Four prompts. Stack them.

Prompt
Grade this against the best in the world. Then rewrite it to that standard.
Prompt
Before I send this, tell me what's weak. Don't be polite. Where does my reader stop caring?
Prompt
Rewrite this the way someone who charges ten times what I charge would write it. Then tell me exactly what you changed and why.
Prompt
Argue with me. Before I spend another hour on this, tell me why the whole approach might be wrong.

Run it

  1. Take something you've already drafted. Fine, but flat.
  2. Run one of the four.
  3. Run another. Stop when it's good, not when it's done.

The output matches the standard you set. B-plus was your ceiling, not its.

07

Make it convene a board.

It's ten at night. You're making a pricing call alone. Again. You'd give a lot for four smart people to tear it apart before you commit.

You have them. This is the first time most people watch Claude disagree with them.

Prompt
I'm about to decide: [describe it]. Convene my board — a skeptic, an optimist, a CFO, and my ideal customer. Each one weighs in. Then tell me where they agree and what all four would warn me about.

Run it

  1. Bring a decision with real stakes. A price increase. A hire. A channel you're about to cut.
  2. Run the prompt and let all four talk.
  3. Read the skeptic twice. That's the one you came for.

08

Let AI do the post-meeting work.

Your company has hundreds of hours of meeting recordings and not one human being has ever watched a single one of them back. You haven't either. We all turned recording on five years ago and then quietly agreed never to speak about it again.

A recording isn't a record. It's a file. It becomes a record when something actually reads it, and no person is ever going to.

So hand the whole analysis to the AI. Not a summary. The full read: what got decided, what didn't, who owes what, where the room split, and what was sitting under the conversation that nobody said out loud.

Prompt
Analyze this meeting transcript in full.

1. What was decided, and what was left open?
2. Every commitment — who owns it and by when.
3. Where did the room disagree, and did it get resolved?
4. Anything said about budget, timing, or risk.
5. What was under the conversation that nobody said out loud?

Then write the follow-up email and a two-line update for my team chat.

Run it

  1. Turn on transcription. Your meeting tool already has it — Zoom, Meet, and Teams all do, and most send the transcript by email after.
  2. Grab the full transcript and paste it in unedited. Don't trim the small talk; that's where the budget and timing comments hide.
  3. Read the answer to question 5 first. Then send the email and post the update.

Question 5 is the one that surprises people. Ask what was under the conversation and you get back things you half-heard and didn't register.

09

Learn to create skills.

Two weeks ago you had an hour of back and forth and out came the best proposal you've ever sent. People will tell you to go save that chat. It's already saved. It's sitting in your history with four hundred others.

That's not the problem. What you kept was the proposal. You didn't keep the method. So when the next deal shows up you can't re-run it — you'd have to find that chat, scroll it, work out which turns actually mattered, and explain the whole thing again against a different client.

A skill closes that gap. It's a set of instructions the AI keeps and can run again on new input. You train it once and it does it right every time after.

Prompt
This chat produced something good. Turn what we did into a skill I can run anytime on new inputs, so I never explain this from scratch again.

Run it

  1. Find a chat that produced something you were proud of. It's in your history.
  2. Run the prompt inside that chat, while all the context is still loaded.
  3. Open a new chat, point the skill at a different client or project, and run it. Watch an hour become one step.

Skills can connect to your other apps and run on a schedule. That's past this guide. It's also where this road goes.

10The ceiling

The Sunday night brain dump.

Sunday night. Forty tabs open in your head. You've bought the planners. You've made the lists. The list was never the problem. A list is homework, and moving it into your actual week is the part that never happens.

So talk instead. Five minutes. Everything.

Prompt
Here's everything on my mind. Sort it into Do Now, Delegate, and Deep Work. Then build me a dashboard for my day I can check things off.

Run it

  1. Hit dictate. Empty your head. Meetings, handoffs, the thing you keep avoiding.
  2. Run the prompt.
  3. Work off the dashboard for one full day before you judge it.

That works today with no setup. Here's the ceiling: turn it into a skill and connect your calendar. Then the brain dump doesn't get organized — it gets scheduled. You talk. Your day builds itself.

And the step past that is doing all of it without opening a browser. I've been building that. More on it soon.

Appendix

Every prompt, one place.

Copy, paste, adapt. Square brackets mean fill in your own detail.

01Tell Claude who you are.

Ask me these ten questions, one at a time. Remember my answers and use them in everything we do from here on.

1. What's my name and what do I do?
2. What does my business do, in one sentence?
3. Who's my ideal customer?
4. What do I sell and what does it cost?
5. How do I talk? Formal, casual, blunt, funny?
6. What am I focused on this quarter?
7. Who's on my team and what does each person own?
8. What tools does my business run on?
9. What should you never do? Words I hate, styles I hate.
10. What does a win look like twelve months from now?

02Stop typing.

This is a brain dump. Turn it into a clear, organized brief. Keep my language where it's good. Cut the rest.

03Make it interview you.

Before you do anything, interview me. Ask the questions you'd need to do this at the highest level. One at a time. Then do the work.

04Ask what it's missing.

What am I not telling you that would make your output for me ten times better? List it, most important first.
We're not on the same page. What do you need from me to get this right?

05Show it. Don't describe it.

Here's a screenshot. Tell me what's going on and what you'd do about it.

06Don't accept the first draft.

Grade this against the best in the world. Then rewrite it to that standard.
Before I send this, tell me what's weak. Don't be polite. Where does my reader stop caring?
Rewrite this the way someone who charges ten times what I charge would write it. Then tell me exactly what you changed and why.
Argue with me. Before I spend another hour on this, tell me why the whole approach might be wrong.

07Make it convene a board.

I'm about to decide: [describe it]. Convene my board — a skeptic, an optimist, a CFO, and my ideal customer. Each one weighs in. Then tell me where they agree and what all four would warn me about.

08Let AI do the post-meeting work.

Analyze this meeting transcript in full.

1. What was decided, and what was left open?
2. Every commitment — who owns it and by when.
3. Where did the room disagree, and did it get resolved?
4. Anything said about budget, timing, or risk.
5. What was under the conversation that nobody said out loud?

Then write the follow-up email and a two-line update for my team chat.

09Learn to create skills.

This chat produced something good. Turn what we did into a skill I can run anytime on new inputs, so I never explain this from scratch again.

10The Sunday night brain dump.

Here's everything on my mind. Sort it into Do Now, Delegate, and Deep Work. Then build me a dashboard for my day I can check things off.

Where this goes

You opened this as someone who chats with Claude.

You're leaving as someone whose Claude knows the business, pushes on the drafts, sits in on the decisions, and builds the day.

That's the surface. Under it: agents that run while you sleep, skills that talk to your tools, whole workflows nobody touches. That's what I write about every week — from inside a real company, not from a slide.

You made it this far. You're clearly my kind of reader.

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