Lesson Content

Knowing a technique and using it consistently are different things.

You have learned more than twenty Claude features and techniques across this course. Some you will remember because they immediately changed how you work. Others will fade within a week without a record.

A personal playbook solves this. It is not a comprehensive manual – it is your personal shortlist of the techniques that actually work for your work, in one place you will check.

What goes in a playbook – five sections.

Section 1 – Mode-to-Task Mapping: A short table of your most common recurring tasks and which Claude mode they belong in. Three to five entries to start. Update when you discover a task belongs in a different mode than you assumed.

Section 2 – Saved Prompt Patterns: The patterns that have produced reliably good results for your most common task types. For each: the task type, the prompt pattern, and a note on why it works well. Eight to twelve curated entries is a healthy size.

Section 3 – Cowork Skills Reference: A list of your active Skills – name, what it does, customizations you have made. Type / in Cowork to see them, then document the ones you use regularly.

Section 4 – Code Mode Context: Which projects have CLAUDE.md files, where those files are, and when last updated. Prevents the "does this project have a CLAUDE.md?" confusion across multiple projects.

Section 5 – Custom Instructions: A copy of your current Custom Instructions with the date last updated. Serves as a backup and a record of how your standing brief to Claude has evolved.

The capture habit.

The best time to add something is the moment you discover it works. Keep your playbook open during Claude sessions. When a prompt produces exceptional output, copy it into Section 2 immediately. When a Skill works better than expected, add it to Section 3. Thirty seconds per entry. Eliminates the frustration of "what was that prompt that worked perfectly for this?"

The weekly review – five minutes that compound.

Once a week: Did any prompt stop working? Remove or update it. Did you discover a new technique? Add it. Is your mode-to-task table still accurate? Is any Custom Instruction outdated? Five minutes that separate a useful playbook from one that becomes stale and gets ignored.

Sharing with colleagues.

Your playbook is a team asset. Curate a one-page "team Claude guide" from your mode mappings, prompt patterns, and Skill descriptions. What took you weeks to discover can save a colleague days.