Ten Plays You Should Run Immediately

Play 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.

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

Play 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.

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

Play 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.

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

Play 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.

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?

Run it

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

Play 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.

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

Run it

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

Play 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.

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.

Run it

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

Play 07

Put the decision in front of a room.

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.

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

Play 08

Nobody is going to watch the recording.

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.

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

Play 09

Make the good chat repeatable.

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.

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

Play 10The ceiling

The Sunday night 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.

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