You hit your limit in the middle of a job and everything stops until it resets.
Most people think that is about how much they used the tool. Really it comes down to how they used it. One giant chat that runs all day costs many times what the same work costs in short ones.
Thirty five minutes, and you will know exactly what burns your usage, with the habits and the three commands that make a limit last.
For anyone who has been locked out mid task. No new tool and no new plan. Six or seven habits, and after a week you stop thinking about them.
The proof behind this
Liz Elliott runs her whole operation on AI automations across several computers, feeding 33 active social brands. At that volume a bloated chat is not a small annoyance.
What this lesson is
Lesson 5.6 of the free AI for Entrepreneurs course, in Module 5: Memory And Context.
A token is roughly one word, and every plan gives you a set amount. Here is the part most people never learn. Every time you send a new message, Claude reads the whole chat again from the top before it answers. Message 1 is cheap. Message 20 is expensive, because it reads all 19 messages first. The space holding all of that is called the context window, and it works like a desk. Your messages, its answers, any file you dropped in, your instructions, the tools it loaded. When the desk is covered, two things happen. It costs more, and the work gets worse, because the important paper is buried under an old sandwich wrapper. So there are two separate jobs here. Keep the desk clean, and stop paying premium prices for cheap work. The strongest model costs the most, and most of what you do all day does not need it.
New here? Use the free AI for Entrepreneurs course outline to read this series in the best order.
What you will be able to do
Explain in one sentence why message 20 costs more than message 1
Cut your usage with five habits that take no extra effort
Pick the right model for the job instead of using the big one for everything
See exactly what is filling your context, and clear it the right way
Trim a bloated instructions file down to the lines that earn their place
Your first step
Before any of the habits, look at where your usage is actually going. Notice how long your chats run. One chat that carries your whole day is the single most expensive thing most people do, and starting a fresh one for each unrelated task costs nothing. Do that for one day and you will feel the difference before you change anything else.
Behind the paywall
The batched request, the exact edit, and the full context prompt
The token habits file you paste into
CLAUDE.mdso the habits run without you remembering themThe three Claude Code commands, and which one to use when
The cheap executor setup, and the one line people get wrong
The seven step cleanup pass for a bloated instructions file
The twelve mistakes, including the one that quietly doubles what you spend, and the checklist
What paid subscribers get overall
Paid subscribers get every part of AI for Entrepreneurs in full. Every numbered step, every prompt in a block you can copy, the mistakes list, and the checklist at the end. You also get the rest of the run as it goes out, and the whole paid archive on Liz on the Web.
Subscribing opens the locked half of this post right away. You do not wait for the next one. The rest of this lesson opens the moment you click.
The free half above is the concept, and it stands on its own. The locked half is the work.
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