In the previous piece I wrote about the double hours Anthropic is giving away in Cowork this month. That makes it a fine moment to begin, so here is the how. No theory, just an evening of work after which you can do it yourself.
You need a Claude subscription on Pro, Max or Team. Cowork is included. Plan for an hour the first time, and a second session to really pull it into your work.
1. What Cowork is
Cowork is a workspace where Claude does not just answer, it does things for you. It can use your apps, read and edit files, go on the web, and take several steps in a row without you typing a new question at every step. Think of it less as a chat and more as a colleague working next to you.
The difference from the regular Claude chat is that Cowork holds on to a task. You give an instruction, it gets to work, and you watch along or steer.
2. Your first task
Start small and concrete. Not “help me with my work”, but something with a clear end. For example: “read this document and give me the three weak spots in the argument.”
Two things help right away:
- Give context up front. Briefly say what you already know and what your goal is. That saves a round of back and forth.
- Ask for pushback. Do not just ask for a summary, ask for the gaps, the risks, the counterargument. That is where the value sits.
If it does not land well at first, steer instead of starting over. Cowork keeps the thread of the task.
3. Connect your apps
Cowork only gets truly useful when it can reach your stuff. Through connectors you link, say, your mail, your calendar or your notes app. After that you can ask things like “find the meeting with that supplier and put the details in a note.”
Start with one connection you use often. For me that was mail. Only once that runs smoothly do I add the next. Switching everything on at once is a recipe for noise.
4. Work in projects
A project is a folder with memory. Everything you settle there stays put: your preferences, your sources, the tone you work in. Open the project again and you do not have to explain it all over.
Use projects to separate your work. One for wine content, one for client work, one for your own admin. That way you talk each time to a Claude that already knows the right context.
5. Build a custom skill
This is the step where Cowork goes from handy to hard to live without. A skill is a fixed chore you describe well once, so that afterwards you call it up with a single sentence.
My favourite example is recipes. I often find something online I want to make, but in cups and ounces, scattered across a wall of text with ads in between. In one instruction, my skill does this:
- Pulls the recipe from the page and strips the noise.
- Converts the measures to metric, grams and millilitres instead of cups and ounces.
- Writes it out cleanly as an ingredient list plus steps.
- Saves it to my notes app, ready for the kitchen.
That skill runs inside a project, so the context is always right. Build it once, and after that it costs me a sentence. Start with your own version of this: pick a chore you repeat every week, describe it step by step, and let Cowork capture it.
To close
You do not have to learn it all in one evening. Start with a small task, connect one app, make one project, and build one skill. That is enough to feel where Cowork makes your work lighter.
And with this month’s double hours, you have the room to ease into it.
This piece also appeared in Dutch: Starten met Claude Cowork.