Most people are using Claude Projects wrong. They open a project, give it a name, and immediately start typing. The instructions box, the single field that decides whether Claude shows up as your brilliant protege or your bored intern, sits empty.
That empty box is the difference between flat AI copy you spend an hour fixing and a first draft you can actually use. The fix is a template I use every time I set up a project. You can remember it as A-A-C-T-O-R, and once you have it, you stop rewriting Claude’s output and start shipping it.
What a blank instructions box actually costs you
In the video I ran a demo – I dropped the same prompt – write a 200-word email announcing a summer sale for an eco-friendly clothing brand – in two projects. One with the instructions box empty. One with it filled in.
The project without instructions gave me exactly what you’d expect: a serviceable subject line, a generic “shop the summer sale” body, a note to add my logo. It was ok, but it kind of made you wonder if AI saved you any time at all.
The project with instructions gave me five subject-line options, completely different imagery, buyer-focused language pulled straight from the brand details I’d set up, and a recommended image.
Leaving that box empty is like handing Claude a box of Legos and no manual. It’ll build you something. It probably won’t be what you were hoping for.
When you don’t tell it what perspective to have or what the goal of the project is, it fills in the missing details from the average of the training data. And you end up spending a bunch of time fixing it.
Project instructions are a standing prompt
One way to think about instructions is that they act like a standing prompt. Write it once and you’re done. A good prompt has a role, a task, an output. Good instructions have the same bones.
So instead of re-explaining your expectations every session, you jump straight to “draft this email” or “review this plan,” and Claude already knows the assignment. You get less setup time, output that’s shaped by your audience and goals from the first word, and higher quality across sessions because the project is building history as you go.
The AACTOR template
A-A-C-T-O-R is how I remember the pieces.
A: Act as. The role you want Claude to assume. If you’re working for clients, it’s usually your role: act as an HR consultant, act as a business consultant. If you want a different lens, this is where it goes. Roles matter more than people think. Ask Claude to summarize a contract as a business owner and you’ll get the gist, the risks, the next steps. Ask it as an associate at a law firm and you’ll get a line-by-line breakdown. Same document, different output, because the role tells Claude what to prioritize.
A: Audience. You’d talk to a room of lawyers differently than a room of business owners, and to serious athletes differently than the Couch to 5K crowd. Act as and Audience do a lot of heavy lifting. Use nothing but those two and you’ll already reshape the output dramatically.
C: Context. Five to ten bullet points, max. This is not where the proposal or the full style guide goes. Long documents belong in an uploaded file in the context area. Here you stick to the business the client is in and the end goal of the project.
T: Task. This one depends on the project. If it’s a single client where you do lots of different things, leave task out and specify it in each prompt. But if the project does the same job over and over – I have one just for my YouTube packaging, the hooks, titles, and thumbnails – then the task belongs in the instructions.
O: Output. Same logic as task. Describe the format and level of detail you want every time. A workshop project might always produce a 15-slide deck, a talking-points doc, and a PDF workbook. Scope the end goal so you’re not reconfiguring it each session.
R: Rules. Your non-negotiables. I use three on almost everything:
- load my context files at the start of each session
- ask me questions until you’re 98% confident you can complete the task
- create a plan first and wait for approval before building anything.
That last one keeps Claude from running amok before I’ve see where it wants to take me.
What it looks like filled in
Here’s the actual template behind that sales email.
Act as: an award-winning copywriter . Honestly, I don’t know that “award-winning” does much, but it seems to be best practice, so in it goes.
Audience: eco-conscious moms, 28 to 45, which dials in both the language and the imagery.
Context: an eco-friendly brand with a minimalist coastal aesthetic, one tight line instead of a full brand dump.
Task: write sales emails and recommend an image for each.
Output: short, punchy, playful
Rules: don’t exceed 300 words, include a CTA, give five subject-line options.
The template creates enough specificity to move the writing out of the average bin and into something that’s closer to what a final version might look like.
The one mistake to avoid
The most common way people break this is by overloading the instructions. You’ll get better results going the other way. Keep the instructions short and to the point, and use them to reference the longer files you’ve uploaded in context.
Leave any piece out when you want more flexibility, add it back when you want more control. Your job is to fine-tune until the output is a draft that’s pretty close to done.
