I have found it useful to create a Claude Project called something like “2026 Soul Searching” in which I have added all the context necessary to deal with my personality type and idiosyncrasies. I didn’t want to have all that information in the website-wide “personal preferences” field to avoid Claude always engaging in a personal coach-way. I use it for work a lot and there’s no value there in managing my quirks. The Project serves as the baseline for moments where I know those quirks are a roadblock or have outsized influence on decision making.
One way it has helped engineer change is how strong it is at catching mental patterns before they’re fully on display. I’ll give you an example, replacing the quirk with a placeholder one (not interested in sharing my exact one): Task initiation block. In the Project context, I give full and honest details about how task initiation block has affected my life in recent years, with concrete dated examples, and whether I knew I was doing it at the time.
Because I know I have experienced task initiation block a lot lately, I have developed all sorts of hedging language around decisions that are affected by it. So, if I start a chat in the Project and plainly detail how I’m feeling re: a task/decision ahead, I might feel like I’m nowhere near displaying task initiation block, but Claude is remarkably good at picking up the train of thought that leads me from tnow to tblock. It still catches me off guard.
An analogy that comes to mind is when you say “I’m great, how are you?” to a close friend when you’re not feeling great at all, but the words come out with full self-confidence, before the friend snaps you out of it by saying “You don’t sound like you’re great!”.
Intuitively I know that it over-indexes on the context provided in the Project. Sometimes it’ll draw a link between tnow and tblock and I’ll just respond “Nah, I’m good, I’m not displaying task initiation block here”. But when it draws the link correctly, it can snap me out of it, and I’ve had > 10 instances of being helped by the realization that I was slowly moving towards a mental block.
I have found it useful to create a Claude Project called something like “2026 Soul Searching” in which I have added all the context necessary to deal with my personality type and idiosyncrasies. I didn’t want to have all that information in the website-wide “personal preferences” field to avoid Claude always engaging in a personal coach-way. I use it for work a lot and there’s no value there in managing my quirks. The Project serves as the baseline for moments where I know those quirks are a roadblock or have outsized influence on decision making.
One way it has helped engineer change is how strong it is at catching mental patterns before they’re fully on display. I’ll give you an example, replacing the quirk with a placeholder one (not interested in sharing my exact one): Task initiation block. In the Project context, I give full and honest details about how task initiation block has affected my life in recent years, with concrete dated examples, and whether I knew I was doing it at the time.
Because I know I have experienced task initiation block a lot lately, I have developed all sorts of hedging language around decisions that are affected by it. So, if I start a chat in the Project and plainly detail how I’m feeling re: a task/decision ahead, I might feel like I’m nowhere near displaying task initiation block, but Claude is remarkably good at picking up the train of thought that leads me from tnow to tblock. It still catches me off guard.
An analogy that comes to mind is when you say “I’m great, how are you?” to a close friend when you’re not feeling great at all, but the words come out with full self-confidence, before the friend snaps you out of it by saying “You don’t sound like you’re great!”.
Intuitively I know that it over-indexes on the context provided in the Project. Sometimes it’ll draw a link between tnow and tblock and I’ll just respond “Nah, I’m good, I’m not displaying task initiation block here”. But when it draws the link correctly, it can snap me out of it, and I’ve had > 10 instances of being helped by the realization that I was slowly moving towards a mental block.