Personal-Laptop Policy

You’re running this curriculum on a personal laptop — the one where you have administrative privileges and can install software freely. That’s the right machine for learning the workflow.

The constraint isn’t which tools Claude can use. It’s what content is reasonable to put on a personal machine you control. Most readers come to this curriculum with day-job material that they shouldn’t be moving onto personal hardware: confidential client work, proprietary internal documents, regulated data, things subject to NDAs or compliance regimes. This policy is about keeping that work where it belongs.

The rule

Public, synthetic, or personal data only. If something belongs to your employer, a client, or a third party who hasn’t authorized you to move it onto your own machine, don’t put it here. Not as a file. Not pasted into a prompt. Not paraphrased into a prompt.

This curriculum teaches the shape of the work — synthesize sources, build a custom briefing tool, automate a recurring scan. The shape transfers to whatever material you actually care about, on whatever machine you’re authorized to use it on.

What’s fine

• Genuinely public sources. Government data, news articles, public reports, open datasets, published research, regulatory filings, anything you’d link to a friend without thinking twice.
• Synthetic / hypothetical examples. “Imagine a contract that does X.” “Suppose a colleague asks for a weekly summary of Y.” These are how you’ll learn the workflow without involving real material.
• Your own personal life. Calendar, email, your own writing, your own code projects, hobby projects. This is your laptop.

What’s not fine

• Real internal documents from work — memos, drafts, decks, pre-reads — even ones you wrote.
• Real names of colleagues, clients, or other identifying people in any prompt or output.
• Real client deliverables or sensitive deal material.
• Anything covered by an NDA or compliance regime (HIPAA, PCI, attorney-client privilege, classified material, etc.).
• Anything you wouldn’t be comfortable seeing forwarded to someone outside your organization.

When in doubt, abstract one level up. “How would I draft a memo synthesizing a class of decisions” is fine. “How would I draft the memo on that decision” is not.

Placeholders

When the curriculum says “imagine a colleague asks for X” or “draft a memo on Y,” substitute placeholders:

• “Project A,” “Project B” — never the real project name.
• “the policy question,” “the open issue” — never the real one.
• “a senior leader,” “the client” — never a real person.

Claude doesn’t know the difference. The workflow you build transfers cleanly to real material on whatever authorized environment you use for it.

If you’re unsure

Ask before you act. A 30-second sanity check costs nothing. A single piece of work-internal material landing on a personal machine — even briefly — can cost a lot.