You are writing a dissertation over three months, returning most days, always working from the same twelve source papers and a style guide. How should you set this up in Claude?

The principle — the question to ask is whether the same background applies to many conversations. If it does, that background belongs in a workspace rather than in each chat.

Why the key is correct — Anthropic describes projects as self-contained workspaces with their own chat histories and knowledge bases, and describes uploading relevant documents to that knowledge base. Both properties fit this task exactly: the thirteen documents are constant across three months, and the work naturally splits into many separate conversations — a chapter outline, a literature comparison, a paragraph rewrite. Uploading once means none of those threads begins with re-attaching anything.

Why the others are wrong — one three-month conversation makes everything one thread, which is unpleasant to navigate and gives Claude a great deal of unrelated history to work through. Re-attaching thirteen files daily is the manual labour the knowledge base exists to remove. And memory is about continuity between chats rather than a place to keep source documents, so it cannot stand in for uploads.

Remember this — many conversations, one shared background, is the shape that calls for a project.

Sources — Anthropic's projects documentation.