The easiest way to get nothing out of an AI tool is to start with your hardest problem. The easiest way to get something is to start with your most boring one.
A good first job has three things in common. You do it often. The steps are mostly the same each time. And you can tell within a minute whether the result is right. Here are three that fit.
1. Turning rough notes into a clean summary
After a meeting or a call, you have scattered notes, and writing them up takes twenty minutes you would rather not spend. This works well because the facts are already in front of Claude. It only has to organise them, and you can check the result against your own notes.
What to put in the instructions: who the summary is for, how long it should be, and what to leave out. Say whether you want decisions and next steps listed separately. That one choice changes the result more than anything else.
2. Checking a draft against a list
If you review the same kind of thing again and again, you already have a mental checklist. Write it down and let Claude run through it first. It could be a document that must include certain sections, a message that must follow a format, or a report that needs the same numbers each week.
Claude will not catch everything, so you still look at the result. But it takes the first pass off your plate and points you at the parts that need attention.
3. Writing the first version of something routine
Status updates, replies to common questions, short descriptions. You know what they should say, and getting the first words down is the slow part. Give Claude a good example of what you would send and the facts for this time, then edit what comes back.
The key word is first. You still read it, change it and send it as yourself.
What to skip at the start
Skip anything where a wrong answer is expensive and hard to spot, like legal wording or figures nobody will double-check. Those can come later, once you trust the setup and know where it slips.
Pick one
Choose the job you did most recently that felt like a chore. Write down the steps you took, as if you were explaining them to someone new. That list is most of your first skill, and the post on what a skill is shows how to turn it into one.