Most people open Claude, type a question, get an answer, and call it a day. That works — but it’s leaving a lot on the table. A handful of settings changes, most of which take under two minutes, will make every conversation you have with Claude noticeably better. Here’s what to set up.
1. Turn On Memory
Head to Settings → Memory and flip it on. Once it’s enabled, Claude starts building a picture of who you are — your name, your work, your preferences, how you like things done. The difference shows up immediately: you stop re-explaining yourself at the start of every conversation, and Claude starts giving answers that actually fit your situation. It’s the single highest-leverage setting in the app.
2. Set a Writing Style
Go to Settings → Styles and create at least one custom preset. Give Claude a few examples of how you write — a blog post, a caption, a few emails — and it will learn your voice. From that point forward, anything Claude writes for you comes out sounding like you, not like a generic AI assistant. You can create multiple styles for different contexts: one for your blog, one for social media, one for professional emails.
3. Enable Web Search
By default, Claude works from its training data, which has a cutoff date. Enabling web search (available from the + menu in any conversation) lets Claude pull in current information — recent news, updated stats, live product details. For any research task, content creation, or question where “as of right now” matters, this is a must.
4. Use Projects Instead of Regular Chats
If you’re working on anything ongoing — a blog, a business, a side hustle, a creative project — create a Project for it. Projects let you attach custom instructions that Claude reads before every conversation in that project. You set the context once and Claude carries it forward automatically. No more copy-pasting the same background information every time.
5. Fill Out Your User Preferences
Go to Settings → User Preferences and spend five minutes filling it in. Tell Claude what you do, how you want responses formatted, what you never want to see. These preferences load with every conversation and quietly shape every response you get.
6. Connect Your Apps
Under Settings → Integrations, you can connect Claude to Google Drive, Gmail, Notion, Canva, and more. Once connected, Claude can read your actual files and documents rather than working from scratch. Ask it to summarize a document in your Drive, draft a reply to an email, or pull context from a Notion page — all without copying and pasting anything.
The Takeaway
None of these settings are hidden or hard to find. They are just easy to skip when you are focused on getting an answer. But once you set them up, they work in the background on every conversation — which means the payoff compounds over time. Spend 15 minutes on this once and you will be ahead of the majority of Claude users.
Real Life with the Larreaus 