Welcome back!
Part 1: Before I Scrub In was about setting Claude up to win. Part 2 is The Night Shift… keeping the work going while I’m off doing life.
6. Claude clocks back in while I sleep
My usage resets every 5 hours. When I know we’re about to hit the wall, I set a timer. Claude wakes back up after the reset and picks up right where we left off.
On 08/21 I set two: one at 3 hours, one at 8. Then I went to bed. The work kept going. Night shift, but make it Claude.
7. Give report at shift change
Nurses never leave without giving report. Neither does Claude.
A long session fills up Claude’s working memory. So it compacts: it squishes the whole conversation into a summary and keeps going. A sloppy summary loses details. So on 06/07 we built a handoff form. Mission, done, in flight, next steps, files touched, decisions, gotchas, open questions. Exact file paths and numbers, nothing dropped.
The last line tells Claude to keep working from next steps. No greeting, no re-planning, no asking me if it can continue. It compacts early too, at 400k tokens, so it stays sharp.
8. The rules ride along on every message
A rule saved in memory doesn’t always fire. So a hook reads my 18 standing rules to Claude on every single message. Rule 1 even makes Claude count them and tell me if any got cut off.
The same hook stamps the real time. On 06/03 Claude guessed “evening” at 1 PM. Now it reads my laptop’s clock every message, and it follows me across time zones. And if I tell it to research for an hour or two, it has concrete time to go off of, instead of guesstimating.
9. Ask Claude what it needs
Before a big task, I ask one question: what do you need to do this right?
Sometimes the answer is a login, a file, or a screenshot from me. Sometimes it’s a tool Claude has to build first. On 06/21 the cannon in my bubble game looked a little… phallic. So I asked what tools Claude had to make it look like an actual cannon. On 08/21 I gave a big overnight project the green light to research or build its own tools anywhere it came up short.
10. The done list
Nothing eats an afternoon like redoing finished work. On 08/01 a status check told me two things were still open… I’d already finished both. So we built a done ledger. Mark it done once, and it stays done. Claude reads the ledger before calling anything open.
My HTML page is for my eyes. The done list is for Claude’s.
Steal my tools
Standing Rules and Hooks both sit on my Gifts shelf. Grab them and go build something kinda dope!