Memory Files Beat Long Prompts

Open a new Cowork session. Before you can ask your real question, you paste in the same block you always paste: who you are, what you're working on, who the client is, the three constraints that matter. Two hundred words of preamble. Then your one-line ask.

You did this yesterday. You'll do it tomorrow. Every conversation starts with the same throat-clearing, copied from a note you keep in a doc somewhere, edited slightly, pasted again.

The replies are fine. That's not the problem. The problem is the tax: you're paying a context toll by hand, at the start of every session, forever.

It feels like diligence. It's actually the slow way to work. The fix isn't a longer, sharper paste. It's writing the context down once, in a place Cowork reads on its own.

#The paste is a workaround

Every Cowork session starts blank (an earlier series covered why). The paste is how most people patch that blankness: re-supply the context manually, every time. It works, which is exactly why the habit sticks.