Stop 2 of 6 · Read once
The ground rules
Five things that make people quit in week one: running out, long chats, what never gets pasted, and the two buttons nobody notices.
What it is
Lina now knows what Claude is. These are the five rules of the room. Most people who try AI for a week and give up hit one of them, decided the tool was broken, and went back to doing it all by hand.
Out of messages is normal
Every plan has a usage allowance that refills on a rolling window. Long PDFs and the more capable models spend it faster. Seeing it does not mean anything is broken. Wait for the refill, or switch to the faster model in the picker and keep working. Do not go and buy something in a panic. Current plans and limits live at claude.com/pricing.
New topic, new chat
A chat is one thread of thought. When Lina switches from the Henderson proposal to next month's insurance renewal, she starts a new chat. Very long chats get slower and Claude starts dragging in details from forty messages ago that no longer apply. Starting fresh costs nothing, and stop 5 shows how a Project carries the context you actually want to keep.
What never goes in
On a personal plan, keep out anything you would not read aloud in a lift. For Lina that means signed client contracts, staff pay and home addresses, and the firm's bank details. She can still get the work done: swap real names for roles, swap exact figures for round ones, and paste the shape of the problem rather than the record itself.
For the one-off you would rather Claude not keep at all, use an incognito chat. It does not show up in your history and it does not feed memory. It is the right home for a delicate question about a person.
Edit, retry, react
Three buttons that are easy to miss. Hover your own message and you can edit it and run it again, which is far better than typing "no, not like that" underneath. Hover Claude's answer and you can retry it, including on a different model. And the thumbs are feedback, not manners. A thumbs down on a genuinely bad answer is how the product gets better.
Try this
Rewrite the email below so it is under 120 words, keeps every fact and every date, and ends with one clear ask. Keep my tone: friendly, direct, no filler. I am the office manager at a nine-person engineering firm. [paste the rambling email]
That is close. Make it two sentences shorter, keep the deadline, and drop the apology at the start.