Your First Real Use
What we're doing today.
Five lessons of setup. Now we use it. We're going to ask Family Manager to plan this week's dinners — and you'll see how different the answer is from a normal Claude conversation, because Family Manager already knows your family, your preferences, and how you want it to behave.
This is one meal plan, not the full meal-planning system. The deeper meal lessons (the budget version, the pantry-to-plate version, grocery list handoff, recipe rescues) live in the Meal Planning Deep Dive module in Phase 4. Today is just the demo — proof that what you built actually works.
What you'll have at the end of this lesson
- A meal plan for the rest of this week, generated by Family Manager
- A saved file in your Family Manager folder called current-week-meals.md — the first "current state" file in your system
- A real feel for what Family Manager does when it has everything it needs
The first real ask.
Open Family Manager (Projects → Family Manager in Cowork). Start a new chat (new-chat-when-topics-change habit kicks in here). Send something like this:
Notice what's not in that prompt: how many dinners, dietary restrictions, kid-friendly notes, what you've already eaten, what tools you have. None of that. Family Manager has most of it from your Factsheet, your tone from your Mom Profile, and your behavioral rules from your Custom Instructions. The prompt is short because the Project is loaded.
What you should see.
Family Manager will probably ask a few quick questions — what's in the fridge right now, anything you don't want to repeat from last week, any nights you'll be out. Answer them. If you want to skip a question ("no preference, you pick"), that's fine.
Then Family Manager will produce a meal plan. The format depends on what you set in your Custom Instructions — table, list, paragraphs, whatever you specified.
Refine it, then save it.
First drafts rarely land perfectly. That's fine — refinement is part of the workflow. If something feels off about the meal plan, tell Family Manager and ask it to revise.
Examples of refining moves:
Iterate until it feels right. Then tell Family Manager to save the final version:
Cowork saves the file. Open Finder (or File Explorer) and look inside your Family Manager folder — current-week-meals.md should be sitting there. Open it; it's just a regular text file with your week's plan.
About that filename.
Throughout the course, you'll see files named current-something — current-week-meals, current-week-priorities (Phase 3), current-month-money-scan (Phase 4), and so on. They're a pattern: a single living file per Project that represents "the current version of this thing." Cowork updates it, your dashboard reads from it (in Phase 3), and the rest of your system can reference it. You just created your first one.
Phase 2 — done.
You have a working Family Manager. It knows who's in your house, knows how you want to be talked to, behaves according to your rules, and just delivered something useful you can actually use this week.
What you built across Phase 2
- Cowork up and running on your computer
- The folder pattern for where Projects live
- A Family Manager Cowork Project connected to its folder
- A Family Factsheet and Mom Profile, loaded as Family Manager's context
- Custom Instructions that match your preferences
- One real working meal plan saved as current-week-meals.md
And one habit that powers everything that follows: ask Cowork first, before doing it yourself.
Next phase: Cowork Goes With You.
Phase 3 turns Cowork from a thing you sit down at into a thing that goes everywhere with you. You'll learn Dispatch (talking to Cowork from your phone, anywhere), the Brain Dump pattern (any time of day or week, get the chaos in your head sorted into action), Scheduled Tasks (Cowork running things on its own schedule), and you'll build your Family Dashboard — the view that ties everything together.
Continue to Dispatch →