Claude sidebar, part one
Stop running two unrelated jobs through one Claude chat
You opened Claude and found six things in the sidebar: Chats, Projects, Code, Artifacts, Dispatch and Cowork. Two of them decide how good your answers are, and nobody tells you which. This is what Chats handles, where it runs out of room, and why a labor rate analysis and a spray paint question should never share a thread.
- Sections in the sidebar
- 6
- Explained here
- 2
- Projects on a free account
- 5
- Read
- 3 min
Where this leaves you
- What Chats is good at, and the two walls it runs into: files sitting on your own computer, and work that outlives a single sitting
- Why a labor rate analysis and a spray paint question drag each other down when they share one thread
- The question to ask before you start typing, so you know whether this is a chat or a project
- What a project actually holds: its own chat history and a knowledge base Claude reads on every chat inside it
Which one to open
One question, asked before you start typing.
- 01
Ask whether you will come back to this. A definition, a quick rewrite, one lookup you will never think about again: that is a chat. Open it, take the answer, move on.
ChatsChats is the section you already know from every other assistant. One message in, one answer out. It is fenced into the browser, so it is not reaching files on your computer and it is not carrying a long effort forward.
- 02
If the work has a name you would say out loud, give it a project. The labor rate analysis has a name. So does the repainting job. A passing curiosity does not.
Projects - 03
Keep unrelated work out of it. The spray paint question does not belong in the labor rate project, and holding that line is the whole benefit.
This is what context pollution means in practice. Every stray topic sitting in a thread is one more thing Claude weighs while answering the one you actually care about.
- 04
Put what Claude should always know into the project's knowledge base. Files, notes, the numbers the work keeps referring back to. Claude reads it on every chat inside that project.
Project knowledge - 05
Come back to the project instead of opening a blank chat. The threads you have already run are sitting in it, so you pick the topic back up where you left it rather than explaining yourself from the top.
Project instructions are worth the minute they take. Tell Claude the role to answer from or the tone to hold, and it applies to every chat in that project instead of the top of every message.
Questions people ask
Do I need a paid plan for this?
No. A free Claude account can create up to five projects, which is enough to separate the handful of things you actually return to. Paid plans add stronger handling of a project's knowledge base, and that starts to matter once you are uploading real volume.
Is a project the same as a folder?
A folder sorts things after the work is done. A project changes what Claude has in front of it while it answers, which is why the sorting shows up in the output rather than only in your file list.
What do I do with the chats I have already run?
Leave them. Start the next thread on that topic inside a project instead of hunting back through the pile. A project earns its contents over a few weeks.
What about Code, Artifacts, Dispatch and Cowork?
Those four get their own walkthrough in the next part. Chats and Projects come first because the habit they build changes every answer after it.
The other four are coming
Code, Artifacts, Dispatch and Cowork each deserve more than a sentence, so they are getting their own part. Chats and Projects come first because keeping unrelated work apart is the habit the rest of it sits on top of. GraniteAI builds and runs AI systems for small and midsized businesses, out of Manchester, New Hampshire. This is that job at a smaller size: find the thing somebody redoes by hand every week, and give it a shape that holds.