Capstone: your one-page Claude workflow plan

You have spent the last four modules learning how to work with Claude. This capstone is where it stops being a course and starts being a habit. The deliverable is not a certificate or a file. It is a personal AI workflow plan — a short document that maps your actual week to Claude, names the features you will use, and commits you to one concrete change you will make this week.

Nobody else will grade this. You are writing it for one person: the version of you who will open Claude on Monday morning and decide — again — whether to use it or not. The plan is there so that decision is already made.

Take 45–60 minutes for this. Do it once, properly, and the rest of the course pays off.

Step 1 — Audit your current work

You cannot improve a workflow you cannot see. Start by listing the recurring work you actually do — not aspirationally, not strategically, but the tasks your week is genuinely made of.

Grab a notebook, a document, or a Claude chat, and list at least ten tasks across three columns:

• The task. Short description. "Weekly status report." "Draft client emails." "Build forecast variance spreadsheet." "Review meeting notes."
• Frequency. Daily, weekly, monthly, ad hoc.
• AI potential. High / Medium / Low, based on two questions: is this task repetitive and structured? and would Claude adding intelligence speed it up meaningfully?

Two rules while you draft. Be honest. Include the work you resent, not just the work you are proud of — the boring repetitive stuff is usually where Claude earns its keep. Be specific. "Do marketing" is not a task. "Write two LinkedIn posts per week from long-form blog content" is.

When the list is done, look at it. The high-potential tasks are your target set. Everything else can wait.

Step 2 — Map tasks to the right Claude feature

This is the step where everything you learned collapses into useful action. For each high-potential task, answer three questions:

1. Is this a recurring workstream with a reusable context? If yes, a Project is almost certainly part of the answer. Group the task into a project with a knowledge base (reference material, examples, templates) and project instructions (tone, format, rules). The first time you set it up, it takes twenty minutes. Every week after that, you save the twenty minutes.

2. Is there a structured output I want back? If yes, ask for it as an artifact — a document, a spreadsheet, a slide deck, a diagram, or something interactive. Artifacts are the difference between "Claude told me something" and "Claude produced something I can ship". Describe the end user and the format the first time, and refine from there.

3. Is this a repeatable process I want done the same way every time? If yes, that is a Custom Skill. You can create one through conversation with Claude in twenty minutes — upload your templates and examples, answer Claude's interview questions, save the result. From then on the process is encoded.

Then ask where the work should happen. Pick the Claude surface that matches:

• Claude.ai (Chat) for drafting, brainstorming, and anything under ten minutes.
• Claude Cowork for sustained multi-source tasks that produce a finished deliverable.
• Claude in Slack for work that already lives in a channel or thread.
• Claude for Excel for anything happening inside .xlsx.
• Claude for Chrome for web research and browser automation.
• Claude Code if the task is software development.

Finally, if the task needs data or tools Claude cannot reach on its own, add the specific connectors it will need — Gmail, Drive, Notion, Linear, Salesforce, whatever matches your tool stack.

By the end of this step you should have, for each high-potential task, a short plan that looks like: "Use a Project called X with these documents and these instructions. Ask Claude in [surface] to produce [artifact type]. Pull context from [connector]. If the process hardens, turn it into a Custom Skill."

Step 3 — Write your personal AI workflow plan

Turn your notes into a plan you could give to a colleague who asked "how do you actually use Claude?" Keep it short. One page is plenty. The structure:

• My top three Claude workflows. Name each one. For each, describe the task, the project (if any), the surface you use, the artifacts you expect, and the connectors involved.
• My first Custom Skill. Pick one repeatable workflow from the list above that you will codify as a Custom Skill in the next two weeks. Write down what the skill will do and what reference material you will give it.
• Where I will not use Claude (yet). Call out one or two tasks where you decided, deliberately, not to reach for Claude — because the task is genuinely human judgement, because the risk is too high, or because the learning cost is not worth the payoff. Owning what you are not delegating is part of the plan.
• How I will know it is working. Name one measurable signal. Time saved per week. Number of drafts shipped. Number of meetings you walked into better prepared. Pick something you could notice and count.

Write the plan in whatever tool you will actually re-read — a Notion page, a Google Doc, the top of your personal README. Treat it as a living document. In three months you will update it.

Step 4 — Commit to one change this week

This is the only rule that really matters. Pick one workflow from your plan and use it this week. Not two. Not five. One.

Write down the specific task, the specific day, and the specific trigger. "Every Friday at 2pm, before my team stand-up, I will run the weekly status-report pattern in my Claude project instead of writing it from scratch." That sentence is the whole commitment.

Tell one person. A teammate, a friend, your manager, your notebook. Saying it out loud turns a plan into a promise, and promises are what survive the first Monday morning when your default habits would otherwise win.

A final thought

You came into this course knowing what Claude was. You are leaving it with something much more useful — a point of view on how Claude fits into your specific work. That point of view will get sharper every week you practise, and it will transfer to whatever AI tool comes next, because it is built on the four competencies that outlast any particular product: Delegation, Description, Discernment, Diligence.

Claude is a collaborator. Your workflow plan is the invitation. Now go hand it a real task.