Working Smarter with Claude

What could you get done with Claude if you knew how to ask better questions, check its answers and turn a first response into useful work?

Working Smarter with Claude is a practical guide to using Claude for everyday tasks. It begins with your first conversation and builds towards writing, research, planning, creative projects and coding. Each chapter focuses on a task you can try, with example prompts and guidance on reviewing the result.

Learn how to give Claude clear instructions and useful context, then improve an answer through follow-up questions. Use it to draft emails, organise an article, edit your writing and work across languages. Explore ways to study an unfamiliar subject, research a question, understand a long document and find information in your own files.

The book also shows how to approach spreadsheets and calculations carefully, develop ideas for YouTube and social media, prepare presentations and plan projects. Later chapters introduce interactive Artifacts, simple coding tasks and Claude Code for working with larger software projects. A final chapter explains connected tools and multi-step tasks, including the permissions and checks to consider before Claude takes action.

Throughout the book, the emphasis is on using your own judgement. You will learn to spot assumptions, check important claims against their sources, protect private information and test outputs before relying on them. Claude can help you begin and develop a task; you decide whether the result is accurate and ready to use.

Whether you are opening Claude for the first time or want to move beyond basic questions, Working Smarter with Claude offers a clear route from simple prompts to more ambitious projects. Start with the chapter that matches something you need to do, try the examples and adapt them to your own work.

An independent practical guide by William Taylor. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic.