Your First Real Question
A five-minute tour of Claude, then a real question from your actual work.
TUTOR WITH THEFOCUS.AI
Copy this prompt into Claude, ChatGPT, or any external AI assistant. It points the assistant to the course instructions and links it to your student profile to track your progress and customize observations.
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Get set up and learn where things are
This is a hands-on course, so the first thing we are going to do is get you into the tool and oriented. If you already live in claude.ai every day, skim this section — but do not skip the exercises, because the course builds on them.
Go to claude.ai and sign in (or create an account — the free tier is enough for this chapter and the next two). What you see is deceptively simple: a text box. Almost everything in this course starts from that box, so it is worth thirty seconds to learn what is around it.
| What You See | What It Does | When You Will Use It |
|---|---|---|
| The message box | Where you type — or dictate — anything | Constantly |
| The + / attach button | Add files, photos, screenshots, spreadsheets to the conversation | Chapter 01 (right now), and forever after |
| The microphone | Dictate instead of typing | Chapter 02, where it becomes your capture tool |
| The tools / search controls | Turn on web search and research for questions that need current information | Any time the answer lives on the internet, not in the model |
| The model picker | Choose which Claude model answers | Default is fine; pick the most capable model when the work is hard, a faster one when it is routine |
| The sidebar | Your conversation history, searchable, plus Projects | Finding that thing you worked out last Tuesday |
Two orientation facts that matter more than any button:
Every conversation is saved and searchable. You are not having disposable chats. You are building a record. In Chapter 04 you will learn to distill that record into durable knowledge, but even now: if you solved something good yesterday, you can search for it today.
Your account is the continuity, not the device. The same conversations appear on claude.ai in your browser, in the desktop app, and in the mobile app. Start a conversation at your desk, open your phone, and it is there. This becomes a superpower in Chapter 02.
Sign in to claude.ai. Find each item in the table above — actually locate it, don't just nod along. Attach any file to a message (a PDF, a photo, anything) and ask Claude to describe what it received. Then open the sidebar and note where your conversation was saved. That is the whole tour: message box, attachments, tools, history. Everything else in this course is built from those parts.
Every page of this course has a "Tutor with TheFocus.AI" box. Copy that prompt into Claude and it becomes your tutor for the lesson — it reads the course material, answers your questions, adapts to your background, and tracks your progress. If anything in any chapter is unclear, don't push through confused: ask your tutor to explain it with examples from your work.
Ask about your actual work
Now do something with it. Not “write me a poem” or “explain quantum computing.” A real question that came up this week in your actual work.
Here is the kind of question I mean.
Sarah runs Cornwall Market, a grocery store and bakery in a mid-sized town. Two locations, about fifteen suppliers — produce from Chen’s Produce, broad-line goods from a regional distributor, specialty items from half a dozen small vendors, bakery supplies from two different companies, plus beverages. She opened Claude and typed:
“How should I split a $4,800 contractor payment between renovation and maintenance in QuickBooks?”
Claude gave a solid answer. It explained the difference between capitalizable improvements and deductible repairs. It suggested a reasonable 60/40 split based on the nature of the work. It walked through how to create journal entries in QuickBooks, which accounts to debit and credit, how to handle the depreciation schedule for the capitalized portion. Genuinely useful general accounting knowledge.
But Claude got three things wrong. Or rather, it got three things not even wrong — it simply had no way to know them:
- Cornwall Market uses a custom chart of accounts where contractor payments route through a specific sub-account (6250 — Building Improvements) that their accountant set up for tax reasons.
- Any contractor payment over $2,500 gets flagged for year-end 1099 reporting, and this particular contractor has already hit the $600 threshold this year.
- The renovation work was split across both store locations, and Sarah tracks capital improvements by location for insurance purposes.
None of this is exotic. It is the kind of thing any bookkeeper who has worked at Cornwall Market for six months would just know. But Claude does not work at Cornwall Market. Claude has never seen their QuickBooks file, never talked to their accountant, never processed a contractor invoice for them.
Ask a real work question — something you dealt with this week. Accounting, operations, customer communication, whatever. Notice what Claude gets right (it will probably impress you with general knowledge) and what it gets wrong (it will miss things specific to YOUR context). Write down the things it missed. You will need that list later.