Periphery Skill Manual

/onboard

Before: a new hire at Periphery spent their first week piecing together context — what clients they own, what tools they need, what the...

The aha: Before: a new hire at Periphery spent their first week piecing together context — what clients they own, what tools they need, what the shared Drive structure means, how to prep for meetings, how the team tracks things. Even existing team members had no consistent setup — some had CLAUDE.md files, some didn't, some had half-broken ones. Now you type /onboard in Cowork and 20 minutes later you have a personal workspace that Claude reads at the start of every session — knowing who you are, what you work on, what happened in your last meetings, and what tools you have connected.

What you need to know (2 min read)

/onboard is the starting point for everyone on the team. It sets up your personal Claude workspace — a local folder on your machine where your CLAUDE.md (your identity) and memory/ (your running context) live.

After onboarding, every time you open Cowork, Claude automatically knows:

It's idempotent — safe to run any time. If you've already been set up, it detects that and runs in audit/refresh mode instead of re-doing everything. If you're new, it runs the full 20-minute flow.

The output: four files in your local Claude folder:

~/Downloads/Claude/ (or wherever you set it up)
├── CLAUDE.md ← who you are, your clients, your preferences
└── memory/
├── MEMORY.md ← this week's meetings, action items, client notes
├── company-context.md ← Periphery Digital overview
└── people.md ← team directory

These live on your machine. They persist between Cowork sessions. Claude reads them automatically at the start of every chat.

How it works

/onboard runs in 5 phases. The whole thing takes about 20 minutes.

Phase 0 — Detect & connect. Claude checks what's already in your workspace (fresh setup or existing CLAUDE.md to audit?), probes your connected tools (Slack, Gmail, Calendar, ClickUp, Fireflies, Google Drive), and confirms your local Claude folder and Drive access mode.

Phase 1 — Identity. Claude asks your name, looks you up in the team directory (_Shared/Templates/onboarding/people.md), pre-fills your role, clients, timezone, and EA assignment (if any). You confirm or correct.

Phase 2 — Memory bootstrap. Claude scans your recent tool activity — the last 14 days of Gmail, 7 days of Slack, last week's Fireflies meetings, your Calendar for the upcoming week, your ClickUp tasks — and compiles it into memory/MEMORY.md organized by meeting, action items, and open approvals per client.

Phase 3 — Plugin confirmation. Confirms which plugins are available to you:

Non-AM/PM roles see clients as "available if you need it" rather than primary.

Phase 4 — First habit walkthrough. Claude walks you through running /save once, live, on something from the current conversation. You feel the loop — session ends → run /save → context files stay fresh automatically.

Phase 5 — State write. Claude finalizes your CLAUDE.md with state fields (onboarding-status: complete, save-tier: learning, drive-access-mode: <detected>, local-claude-folder: <your-path>) so future sessions know you're set up.

Local-first workflow

Most of your work lives in your local Claude folder. The shared Drive is for sharing finished work with the team — not for live drafts. This is the team's standing preference.

For PC users who can't connect the Drive: you can use every command in this plugin. Your drive-access-mode gets set to local-only, and when you're ready to share a file with the team, you download it from your local Claude folder and upload it to the shared Drive via your browser. No productivity loss — just a different sync step.

Try it yourself

  1. Create a local Claude folder on your machine (e.g., ~/Downloads/Claude/) if you don't have one. Most of your work will live here.
  2. Open Cowork and create/open a project workspace.
  3. Type: /onboard
  4. Answer the questions honestly — real name, real role, real local folder path. Don't pretend to be someone else or tell Claude "this is a test." The skill works best with real inputs.
  5. At the end, you should see four files in your local Claude folder. Open CLAUDE.md and verify:
  1. Test persistence: close Cowork, open a fresh chat, ask "what do you know about me?" Claude should read your CLAUDE.md and answer correctly.

Quick reference

DetailInfo
Command`/onboard [--reset \--resume]`
Who uses itEveryone on the team (once per person, idempotent re-runs safe)
Time to run~20 minutes (fresh), ~5 minutes (audit/refresh)
PrereqA local folder on your machine where files can persist between sessions
What it producesCLAUDE.md, memory/MEMORY.md, memory/company-context.md, memory/people.md
Modesfresh (new user), audit (incomplete CLAUDE.md), refresh (complete — just check for updates), resume (partial — continue where you stopped)

Tips

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