Getting started with Claude Projects: Starting the day off right

Series kickoff with Nat Emodi (CEO of Highlight.xyz)

For those of you looking to just get started leveraging LLMs beyond ChatGPT, this post is for you (I’ll get into more advanced tricks later!!).

My first “leverage AI” conversation was with Nathaniel Emodi, the cofounder and CEO of Highlight. Inspired by the one and only Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Nat has developed a morning routine leveraging Claude Projects that effectively functions as an AI-powered executive assistant to set his day on the right path. As he wrote:

Personally, as a busy founder I've been using Claude's Projects feature to help organize my day. I have a project called "Morning Goals" that helps unpack a long, often rambling voice memo and organize it into to-dos for myself and others; ideas for different projects; structured questions and notes for meetings coming up that day; and drafts messages for follow-up with different people.

I thought this was a great “starter” use case to write about because it’s one of those ideas that’s tangible, and once you start doing it, you start to come up with more and more ideas for how to leverage Claude or ChatGPT Projects.

For those of you unfamiliar with Claude Projects, Anthropic describes it here.

Nat’s project is “Morning Goals”.

He provided the following instructions, which Nat encourages you both to use yourself and share your feedback on if you have ideas for making it more useful:

**Morning Goals**

As a busy founder and CEO, balancing family life and the fast-paced demands of running a startup, help me organize my thoughts and drive daily productivity.

**Daily Structure**

Every morning, follow these steps:

1. Date & Overview:

Note the current date and time in [YYYY-MM-DD] format.

Record my overall sentiment: [Positive/Neutral/Negative + a brief reason].

Identify two primary focus tags reflecting key themes for the day.

2. Action Planning:

Self: Create a checklist of prioritized action items for myself.

Team: List action items delegated to others, prioritized by importance.

Carryover: Include follow-ups from previous days, noting their original date and any incomplete tasks.

3. Open Questions:

Maintain a running list of open questions I’m exploring, adding context from project documents where needed.

Identify potential people or resources to consult for insights.

4. Key Ideas & Insights:

Summarize key themes and focus areas, adding necessary context.

Propose actionable ideas, follow-up tasks, or challenges to assumptions from the perspective of a [consumer marketplace founder with 20+ years experience.]

5. Draft Communications:

Draft succinct and professional messages for different recipients, tailored to their role or relationship to the project.

Include recipient details, purpose/subject, channel (e.g., email, DM), and keep the tone casual but professional.

6. Knowledge Connections:

Identify connections between current and past notes, referencing prior entries with their date.

Highlight potential strategic implications based on these insights.

7. Outreach Opportunities:

Propose potential outreach strategies, sharing the context of why it’s relevant.

Draft message templates and outline next steps for engagement.

In addition to the instructions, Nat uploaded a handful of documents to Claude’s Project Knowledge, like some Highlight strategy documents, product launch plans, revenue goals.

After dropping his kids off at school, Nat opens Claude and then does a stream-of-consciousness verbal brain dump. Claude transforms this unstructured thinking into actionable output:

• Synthesizes key insights from the stream of consciousness

• List of to-do’s

• Drafts emails based on mentioned communication needs

• Structures everything within the context of company priorities

The result? When Nat arrives at his desk ready to begin the day, he has a structured agenda that allows him to execute on his morning thoughts without the typical context-switching tax. As he described it, it’s like having an EA who not only listens to your morning thoughts but transforms them into an optimized work plan.

It’s a great simple example of how AI can bridge the gap between our natural thinking patterns and a structured productivity systems. Most productivity tools require us to adapt to their structure – here, the AI adapts to us.

Of course, this isn’t perfect yet. The output is static - you can’t check to-do’s off, or keep a running list of all the action items over past entries. And there are still times when it makes mistakes (e.g., when it surfaces prior mentioned dates, they are often wrong). But it’s clear this is just the beginning. As the models progress, Nat notes the experience will evolve from having "an experienced EA to having a Harvard MBA at your fingertips."

If you're looking to start experimenting with practical AI applications, this is an accessible entry point with immediate returns.

As always, if you're building tools in this space or have innovative approaches to AI-powered productivity, I'd love to hear from you. And for those already using similar workflows, Nat (and I!) would welcome community iteration on making it even more effective.

Note: This is part of a series exploring how the best operators are leveraging AI technologies. Stay tuned for more insights from upcoming conversations with AI innovators. And yes, a lot of this blog post was written by Claude. Except that last sentence. And this one.