Here's the answer: you're paying a tax you don't have to pay. Every session where you re-introduce yourself to your own assistant is a session outside a Project, and a Project is the single biggest upgrade in the entire system. It's a workspace where your files, your standards, and your context are shared by every chat inside it. Ask the same question inside and outside a good Project and you'll never work outside one again.
Start with two: a work Project and a life-admin Project, one per hat you wear daily. The work Project takes an hour, once. Write the instructions as rules an assistant could obey, under a page: who you are and what you do in two sentences, your writing standards, what to always ask before assuming, and your format defaults. Then choose ten files that define your work rather than a hundred that describe it: your best writing samples for voice, the offer sheet for facts, the FAQ you answer constantly, one great example of each deliverable. The choosing is the value. A curated Project answers like a briefed colleague. A dumping ground answers like a confused archive.
The privacy rule is the same one that governs your filing cabinet: put in what you'd hand a trusted new assistant on day one, and nothing you wouldn't.
Memory handles the connective tissue between conversations, and it's yours to steward: give it a five-minute review monthly, correct anything stale, and deliberately promote important facts from chat into Project files.
The full build is Volume 5 of our Claude Fluency series.
Context before capability, installed in your own workspace.