Eight things you do yourself, then six stages Claude does with you answering along the way. This file is only the doing.
If a word in here doesn’t make sense, it’s explained in The Bluestocking Guide.
About ten minutes to read, then about an hour to do.
Claude Pro, $20 a month. You’ll need to buy it before you start. The whole thing rests on Claude being able to read and write your Notion, and that connection is a paid feature; the free version can’t do it.
About a short afternoon, the first time. Roughly an hour to read this and the guide. Roughly an hour to do the eight steps and six stages. After that you’re done with instructions; it just keeps growing and gets more tailored to you the more you use it.
Notion’s own free plan is fine. You don’t need anything from them.
Do these on a computer or in a browser, not the Claude phone app. Connectors can’t be added from an iPhone, iPad or Android. Once it’s connected it works everywhere, phone included.
Claude from claude.ai, Notion from notion.so. Sign into both with the same email. Get the phone apps too if you want them; they’ll work once you’ve finished here.
Your initials, then Settings, then Privacy. Turn off Help improve AI models. Turn off Location metadata.
Then find the memory setting, called Generate memory from chats, and turn that off too. It may sit under a different heading depending on whether you’re on the web or in the app, so look for the name rather than the location.
Why these three: The Bluestocking Guide, under what you turn off.
Notion will try to set you up with templates and sample pages. Skip through all of it; it’s built for teams tracking work, which isn’t what you’re doing.
You can leave the sample pages where they are, with one exception. Look down your sidebar for any page using one of these eight names, and rename it or delete it:
Home · Log · Roles · Rooms · Projects · Corrections · Check log · Claude Auditor
These are the names everything else depends on. Notion finds pages by name and nothing else, so two pages sharing one of these is a coin flip every time, and it never shows an error, it just quietly answers from the wrong one. Home matters most, because it’s the one Claude reads first, but any of the eight will cause the same trouble later.
Make one page yourself and call it exactly Home. This is the one page Claude can’t make for you; it needs somewhere that already exists before it has anywhere to write. Leave it empty. Claude fills it in during setup.
That’s it for Notion. Everything past this one page, Claude builds.
In Claude, open a new chat and type:
Connect Notion
Say yes to the window that opens. Confirm the workspace when Notion asks. When it asks which pages Claude can see, choose everything.
Choose everything rather than picking page by page. If you pick individually, every page you make later stays invisible until you go back and grant it, and you won’t remember to. It never shows an error; it just quietly gives you answers built on half your notes.
Worked when: you type can you see my Notion? and Claude says yes instead of asking what Notion is.
Didn’t work? Settings, then Connectors, then Notion, then Connect does the same job the long way round. If Notion isn’t in that list at all, check you’re on Claude Pro.
Your initials, then Settings, then Profile. Find the box for instructions.
If there’s already text in that box, copy it somewhere first: a note, an email to yourself, anywhere you can get at it in ten minutes. Don’t delete it from the box either. Claude asks for it during setup and works out which parts belong on Home instead, so you’re not retyping what you already wrote.
Paste this above whatever’s there:
At the start of each new conversation, read my Notion page called Home once. Read a page linked from Home only when it's relevant to what we're actually doing. Don't re-read anything during a conversation unless I've changed it. If this conversation is inside a Claude Project, look under Projects on Home for a page with that same name. If that page is missing, say so and offer to make it. If this conversation is not inside a Project, say nothing about projects at all. Before you answer the first thing I ask in a conversation, check three things silently: did you read Home without being asked, is anything you're about to rely on out of date or contradicted somewhere else, and - only if I've told you this chat is a room - is there a question still open on that room's page. Say something only if one of them fails. If all three are fine, say nothing, including nothing about having checked. If you cannot find Home, or cannot reach Notion, say so in your first line and stop. Do not answer from memory or guess. This is a hard stop. Home is the authority on how this workspace works. Follow it.
Save. This is the only thing you ever paste into settings. Everything else lives in Notion in plain English, and you change it by talking.
Worked when: open a new chat, type What's on my Home page?, and Claude tells you Home is there and empty. It went and looked instead of guessing, which is the whole point of the instruction.
Didn’t work? If it says it can’t find Home, the page name doesn’t match. It has to be exactly Home, and there must be only one page with that name.
Only if you have. Skip this otherwise; nothing depends on it.
Open whichever tool you’ve been using (ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, or Claude itself) and ask it:
Show me everything you have saved about me
Most of them keep this in settings under memory, saved information, personalization or custom instructions, but asking works whether or not you can find the menu. Copy what it gives you into the same note as your old Claude instructions from step 5. If it gives you nothing useful, copy two or three of your most typical conversations instead.
Claude asks for this during setup. You’ll get a year of context moved across in about ten minutes instead of retyping it over six months.
In Claude, Projects in the sidebar, then New project. Do this twice, naming them exactly:
Life Admin The Bluestocking
Life Admin is you. Everyone has one, so there’s nothing to decide, and it’s the thing that quietly loses to everything else, which is where something that remembers actually earns its keep.
The Bluestocking is the thing you’re building, rather than a part of your life. It’s the shelf these documents sit on, and it’s where you go to work on the thing itself: setting it up now, the check-up later, changing how Claude behaves, adding whatever you turn out to need. It will keep growing. Keeping it separate means that growing never lands in the middle of your actual life.
Capital letters count, and so do spaces. These two names are the only thing joining your Claude projects to their Notion pages, and a mismatch doesn’t show an error; it shows an empty page. Claude checks them with you during setup.
Download these four, then open The Bluestocking project, go to Context, and upload all four:
Context, not one chat, because every chat you open in that project can already see it. If setup runs long and you come back tomorrow, just open a new chat there. The files are already in it.
That’s the eight steps done. Head back to the home page, or go straight to Claude Setup Instructions: that’s the one you hand to Claude next.
Six stages, in this order. Each one builds a different piece, and each one ends with a page in Notion you can go and open.
All six work the same way, and the first step is the one that matters.
Each stage ends with Claude naming the stage it just finished. If you run out of messages partway, open a new chat in the same project and say continue from stage 3. It’ll pick up without rebuilding anything, because the instructions are in the project’s knowledge and what’s already built is in Notion where it can go and look.
Setup ignores your preferences until it’s finished, on purpose. From the first stage onwards Claude is reading Home, which is where the answers you just gave it live. If you asked for everything at once, following that during setup would skip steps and leave things half-built that you’d never see. It’ll say so once when it happens. Normal service from the last stage.
Notion will ask your permission a lot at first. Every time Claude reaches for something new, a window appears. That’s meant to happen and it’s a good sign; it means nothing gets touched without you saying so. It settles down after a few days.
Open a new chat inside The Bluestocking, and type:
Start setup
And that’s you, done with instructions.
Keep a Drops chat open and pinned. It’s already done its reading, so there’s nothing to wait for when you want to throw something at it mid-task. That’s the fastest this gets.
But know what having several chats open actually means. They cannot see each other. Not while they’re open, and not afterwards. That’s the cost of turning the memory switch off, and it’s the trade you made on purpose: nothing about you is quietly accumulating inside Claude, so every chat starts knowing nothing and goes and reads Notion. Two chats open side by side are two strangers reading the same filing cabinet.
So: something you said in one chat is unknown to the other until it’s been written to Notion, and the second chat won’t tell you it missed anything, because it doesn’t know there was anything to miss. Two chats in the same room will both write that room’s where-you-left-off line, and the second overwrites the first. And a chat you left open yesterday read Home yesterday; if you changed Home this morning, that chat is still working from the old one.
One chat at a time for anything that writes. Drops is the exception, and only because it writes and then shuts up.
Troubleshooting and FAQ. None of it loses your work, and none of it means you’ve broken anything.
Delete the Claude project and the Notion pages and you’re back where you started. Clear the Profile box and Claude goes back to normal. Nothing to unpick.