Getting-started guide
Claude, from a standing start.
We'll get you set up together. Over two sessions Claude becomes genuinely useful for your day job — the kind of tool that saves you an hour before your first coffee.
Before anything
First: register. Then relax.
Scan this, give me your name, and everything in this session lands on your own pack page: the deck, the examples, the setup kit. It's already yours, so you don't need to take notes or photograph slides.
Scan here.
Three fields, ten seconds. You land straight on your pack page; bookmark it and put the phone down.
Get your pack now.
Before we set anything up
Watch it work first.
I'll do this live, right now — about ninety seconds. A real consultant's report goes in; a finished, branded executive summary comes out. No template, no fiddling. This is the finish line — everything else today is how you get here yourself.
Dense and technical — the kind that eats an afternoon to read and boil down.
Plain English, one sentence. That's the whole instruction.
Decision, risks, actions — formatted, branded, ready to send.
That's it. Everything after this slide is teaching you to do that yourself — then showing how far the same simple loop goes.
The bigger picture
Today is stage one of six.
Six stages, in three tiers, across a few sittings — not one marathon. Here's the whole climb, and where each of us stands on it today.
Set up & the Cowork loop
BeginnerYou are hereConfigure your Claude, then the document-to-deliverable loop. That's today.
Wire it into your world
BeginnerRun your real projects through it, chain skills, until reaching for it is reflex.
Chaining & your own skills
IntermediateTeach Claude the jobs only you do — build skills around your own work.
Dashboards & tools
IntermediateRead and shape live dashboards and web tools, like the ones you'll see today.
Code
AdvancedStep in to build and change things directly. Where it gets properly powerful.
Shipping apps
AdvancedWhere I'm atFull products, in real people's hands. The far end — for now.
Two minutes, no names
Pick your three before we start.
One quick exercise, and everything after it lands harder. Name three tasks that are repetitive, low-value, and that quietly bug you. Those three are your target — what we point Claude at today, and what you build toward in every stage after.
Repetitive
Every week, or every project, same shape each time. Minutes, status updates, chasing the same numbers.
Low-value
It has to be done, but nobody's paying you to think while you do it. Formatting, reformatting, copy-paste.
It bugs you
The job you push to Friday afternoon. If Claude took it off your plate tomorrow, you'd feel it.
Scan it — drop your three in. They land on the screen in front of everyone, completely anonymous. No names, nothing tied to you — just the tasks.
Plain English first
Two words worth knowing.
Cowork
Claude working alongside you on real files in a folder, reading a consultant's report, writing minutes, drafting a letter. Not a chat window you copy-paste out of. It opens your documents, does the work, and hands you a finished file.
It needs Claude Pro — $17 a month. Cowork is a Pro feature, so that is the price of everything we do today. A free account gets you the chat window, not this.
Skills
Pre-built recipes for a specific job: "executive summary", "minutes of meeting", "commercial evaluation". You don't explain how each time. You say the trigger, Claude runs the recipe, out comes a properly formatted deliverable. We load a toolkit of them in session one.
The one shift that changes everything
Don't ask it questions. Tell it what needs doing.
The search-box habit
Almost everyone starts here: type a question, read the answer, then go and do the work yourself. "What should be in a scope gap analysis?" gets you a tidy paragraph — and you're still the one writing it. That's the smallest thing it can do.
The brief
Say what needs to exist when it's finished. "Read this contractor's report and tell me what to push back on." "Turn these notes into minutes and draft the covering email." Same sentence you'd say to someone across the desk. You're not enquiring — you're handing over the job.
But stay in the room
Handing over isn't firing off an order and walking away. Read what comes back and push on it — "too soft", "shorter", "you've missed the retention clause". The version worth sending is usually the second one, not the first.
Session 1
Part A
Set up your Claude.
Your very first Cowork project, call it "Claude Setup". Drop the pack in, and Claude interviews you, then builds your toolkit with you, skill by skill.
How the setup pack works
A folder, a project, a pack, a plan.
Make one home folder for Claude work. Every new project gets its own folder inside it.
Start a Cowork project called "Claude Setup", pointed at that folder.
The zip goes in as it is — no unzipping. Say run the setup.
Claude asks who you are, then proposes skills one by one — build or skip.
Set aside 30 to 60 minutes and do it once, properly — this is where Claude learns your firm. Nothing is bulk-copied: it builds the skills you want around your brand, so you finish knowing exactly what's in your toolkit.
What that actually looks like
One file, three words.
The zip goes into the message box exactly as it downloaded. No unzipping, no settings, no plugins.
Then you type run the setup and press enter. The pack tells Claude everything else.
What the setup actually asks you
Four things, then you're live.
Who you are
Your role, how you like to work, how blunt you want it. Drop your CV in: Claude reads it and writes your profile so it never asks again.
Your company & brand
Company name, your logo, brand colours. This is what makes your spreadsheets and reports come out looking like your firm, not a template.
The skill build plan
Claude walks a recommended list, summaries, minutes, reviews, letters, trackers, bid evaluations, and asks skill by skill: build this one?
First-run brand prompts
The branded skills stay quiet until you first use one, then they pop up and ask for the detail they need. No huge form up front.
End of session one
What you'll walk away with.
- Claude knows you: your role and context load every time, no re-explaining.
- Your brand is baked in: deliverables come out in your company's look.
- A full toolkit installed: five construction skills, one trigger phrase each.
- Nothing of mine leaks through: your outputs are yours, clean.
That's the boring-but-essential bit done once. Everything after is just using it.
Session 2
Part B
Working with Cowork.
The same loop every time, whatever the task. Learn it once on a document review, and every other job is the same shape.
The loop that never changes
Project → documents → ask → deliverable.
A folder for the job. Think of it as a site file.
Drop the drawings, reports, BOQs, emails in.
Say what you want in plain English.
A finished file, Word, Excel, PDF, back in the folder.
Master this on one task and you've mastered all of them. The shape is identical whether it's a bid evaluation or a chase email.
Workflow 1 · challenge a document
A consultant sends you a report.
The report, the letter, whatever landed in your inbox. Claude reads all of it.
Red flags, gaps, inconsistencies, and the questions you should be putting back to them.
The same findings, now a clean one-page brief with actions, owners and dates.
Executive summary.docxTwo skills, chained: document-review → executive-summary. You never named a skill. The trigger words did it.
Workflow 2 · after a meeting
You come out of a meeting with scribbled notes.
Bullet points, a voice-note transcript, a photo of the whiteboard.
Distilled to prioritised actions and what's overdue: your pre-brief for next week.
Written in your voice, ready to send.
Chase emailready to sendFive skills, worked through
What each one does for you, in a real moment.
Executive summary
.docxA 40-page consultant report lands the night before a board update.
Say give me an ex summary for the board → one page: the decision, the risks, what you're recommending.
Minutes of meeting
.docxYou've just left a two-hour progress meeting with three pages of shorthand.
Say write up the minutes → a clean MOM: attendees, decisions, and an actions table with owners.
Document review
findingsA contractor's variation claim looks high but you can't see why.
Say review this, where's the padding? → red flags, gaps, and the questions to put back to them.
Commercial evaluation
.xlsxFour bids are in on different bases and you need a recommendation.
Say level these bids → a like-for-like comparison, variances flagged, ranked with a call.
Formal letter
.docxA consultant has missed a contractual deadline and it needs to be on record.
Say draft a formal letter on this → letterhead, reference number, the right firm but measured tone.
Your first toolkit
The skills you'll actually reach for.
| When you need to… | Say something like | You get |
|---|---|---|
| Turn a mess into a decision brief | give me an ex summary | One-page brief, Word |
| Write up a meeting | write up the minutes | Formatted MOM, Word |
| Know what to chase next | distil the MOM | Prioritised actions + pre-brief |
| Pressure-test a document | review this | Red flags, gaps, questions |
| Chase or escalate | draft an email to… | Email in your voice |
Master these first — they're the daily loop. Later stages add the heavier set: formal letters and bid evaluations, then trackers and the monthly report.
See what these actually produce↗What you walk out with
Your toolkit after today.
Today's five
- Executive summarydecision brief
- Minutes of meetingMOM
- MOM distilleractions + pre-brief
- Document reviewred-flag a doc
- Email drafterin your voice
Foundation: built on your details
- Your contextwho you are
- Company Excel brandhouse style
Already in Cowork: the base
- Worddocx
- Excelxlsx
- PDFread & build
- PowerPointpptx
Unlocked in stages 3 & 4
- Formal lettersstage 3 · letterhead
- Proposal reviewstage 3 · weighted
- Commercial evaluationstage 3 · rank bids
- Procurement trackerstage 4 · back-planned
- Monthly reportstage 4 · dashboard
Stage 2 wires Claude into your world — connectors and habits, no new skills. Then code and shipped apps in the advanced tier.
How to get good answers
Six habits that do the heavy lifting.
Give it the file, not a description
Don't summarise the report for it. Drop the report in. It reads faster and more carefully than any of us.
Say what "good" looks like
"For senior management", "one page", "flag the commercial risk". The clearer the target, the fewer the rounds.
One job at a time, then build
Review first, then summarise, then email. Each step feeds the next. Don't ask for all three in one breath.
Push back on it
"That's too soft", "challenge them harder", "shorter". It'll redo it. Treat it like a sharp junior, not a vending machine.
Talk, don't type
Dictate like you're briefing a colleague — rambling is fine, it sorts it out. A dictation tool like Wispr Flow (or your keyboard's free mic button) makes this the fastest way to work.
One topic, one chat
Start a fresh chat for each new job. A long thread carrying five unrelated tasks gets slow and muddled; a clean one stays sharp and fast. When a task's done, close it and open a new one.
See it in the wild
A few things it's already built.
Real, live things from my own projects — including two presentations it built end to end. This is the ceiling, not the floor, of what Cowork can put together once you're fluent.
Mall Repositioning Status
A fortnightly portfolio repositioning report.
mall-status.pages.dev ↗DashboardDaily Progress Dashboard
Live site progress for a super-block build.
lsb-dashboard.pages.dev ↗IndexDrawings & Specs Index
It read 650+ drawings and specs and built the searchable index.
parklinks-constech.pages.dev ↓Deck · downloadCinematic Edition
A nine-slide dark presentation — a real, editable PowerPoint, not screenshots.
PPTX · 20 MB ↓Deck · downloadEditorial Edition
The same story as a six-slide light edition — open it and change anything.
PPTX · 9 MBApps, estimators and client tools it's built come later in the journey — stages three and four are where you build your own.
Featured build
One to hold: SOR.
Everything on the last slide is a link. This one is worth opening properly: a real app, on the real App Store, that started as a conversation like the ones you'll have today.
The itch
Site observations were photos in a camera roll and notes on paper. Turning them into a report the team could act on ate the evening.
What it does
Capture an observation on site with photos and notes, and SOR turns it into a branded PDF report, ready to share before you're off the site.
How it was built
Described in plain English, built in conversation, tested on real inspections, then shipped. No development team. The same loop you're learning today, pointed at a bigger target.
Where it is now
Live on the Apple App Store and Google Play as a Stuart Digital product, used on real construction projects.
Reading a live dashboard
Five minutes on the CM Director dashboard.
A portfolio dashboard for a live mall and office build, rebuilt every week from the project's own reports and trackers. It's access-controlled, so I'll drive. Here's how I read it.
Progress against forecast, the headline risks, this week's photos. Thirty seconds tells you whether the week was good or bad.
One schedule, three lines: the baseline we promised, the current target, and what the evidence says is really likely. The gap between the lines is the conversation.
Every headline expands: procurement gates, approvals moving or stuck, zone by zone works. You follow the red, not the whole thing.
Each figure links back to its source: the weekly report, the tracker, the letter. Nothing lives in the dashboard that can't be traced.
The action matrix and the weekly control pack are the output. A dashboard you don't act on is wallpaper.
Where we've got to
You're set up. Stage two is next.
Stage one is done: Claude knows you, your toolkit's loaded, and the document-to-deliverable loop is yours. You've already picked your three tasks — stage two is where your real projects start going through it.
Stage 2 · Wire it into your world. Next session: [date to be confirmed] — you're already registered, so there's nothing to do but show up.
Get your pack
Been before? It knows you — your pack just opens. First time on this phone, it asks you once.
training.stuartdigital.io/p1
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Never used Claude? Open the beginner guide (PDF) — every screen, in order, with a picture for each one.
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