Mastering Claude Cowork: From Zero to Fluent 🚀

This is going to be specifically useful if you want to start using AI for business to go from the stage where you are just talking to a AI or chatting with chat, CPT go to the second level which is delegating having AI do stuff, perform stuff for you, on demand or on schedule.

to summarize the video we are going to cover where you can find Claude Cowork, the difference versus chat.

We are going to explain to you the structure of folders and projects differences as well.

also the three basic setup.

Then we're going to cover skills, connectors and plugins.

Running a task on schedule, on web, meaning you don't need your computer open for that task to be running.

And also being able to use it on mobile on your phone as well So when you are onboarding or getting on board on Claude, you can do it on Claude AI just creating your account.

They actually give you like a simple explanation between the three main tabs they have chat, ask questions, brainstorm and tackle problems together.

Cowork.

That's the thing we're going to be focusing on for complex work.

Work across your files and apps, build repetitive workflows best on desktop.

So that's what I want to get to.

You want to download it?

in my case it's for Mac.

In your case could be Windows or Mac.

Encode of course is for coding.

We're not going to cover that today.

So once you have it downloaded.

The way for you to find where Cowork is, it's quite easy.

So you have two main tabs here, Home and code.

You want to go to home and new once you are there.

that is because the code here is the cloud code.

We don't want that for now.

So home, new and once you are there you're gonna have a chance to choose between chat and co work.

And as we saw it, even Claude we say it chat is chat with a words back and forth.

Very useful.

But that's not why we're here today.

With Cowork you can actually Delegate.

You can have AI perform tasks for you.

So in chat you ask, it answers back.

but you will have to do the work Cowork gives you finished work actually done by AI, done by Claude.

It reads your files, uses your connections, hands you the result.

You're probably going to get started with the $20 a month and then eventually you're going to upgrade or not to the $100 a month, which both are if you're going to actually use it.

Very.

So the first thing I want to show you is the basic setup when you are getting started with Claude, especially Cowork.

And where are you going to find this?

Well, if you go to, you click on your name here and you go to Settings.

The first thing I want you to update is this profile section here.

your preferences, basic stuff as your name, what best describes your work and instructions for Claude.

and this applies for chat and co work.

So.

You can click here to understand better what best thing to populate here.

But I'll do you one better.

Because the second thing I want you to also fill in or populate is again on Settings, but you're going to go to cowork and here.

That's where you're going to very important.

Choose a folder on your computer where you're going to.

This is going to be the routes for every single new session, or cowork, task that you start.

Eventually you're going to start creating subfolders under this new route.

in many cases, actually.

You also want to have the dispatch on and run new tasks in the cloud on SD4 as well.

Because we're gonna get to the point later on where we want Claude Cowork to keep working, keep performing while we are away.

And the computer is not, Claude is not even open.

Unfortunately, I don't have any more gifts, to give you.

But here lies the final part of this basic setup that I keep talking to you about, which is the global instructions.

And these instructions that apply to all Cowork sessions.

Unlike the other one where you would have your profile instructions that would apply for both Chat and Cowork.

This is specifically for Cowork sessions where you can describe your preferences, conventions, context that Claude should always keep in mind for every single Cowork session.

So now you ask me, Luis, how am I supposed to populate to fill in those fields.

is it just random things from my head?

Well, you can do that, but I have something better for you.

I have this here that I've given away, for free in a previous video where you can actually use this prompt to set up the instructions for the profile and the global instructions as well.

So you're giving a prompt to Claude.

Claude's going to ask you a few questions and by the end of that back and forth, you're going to have what you should, use as the profile instructions.

Number one and two, the global instructions.

I'm going to drop that link in the descriptions.

Don't worry.

So now you know where to find it.

You know the difference between Claude, cowork and chat.

you know why you're focusing on co work, right?

To go for the second level from just chatting to actually having AI does stuff for you.

You are able to set up the basic instructions, both profile and cowork global instructions.

It's time for us to learn about projects and folders.

So if you remember, I have shown you, the main routes where all my cowork sessions will be under or most of my cowork sessions will be under the ones that have subfolders.

And this is where you will, when you're starting a new task, you will choose if you want it to be on, under a new folder or project or not.

I always recommend for most of the cases, especially for co work, unlike a shed that you always do that.

And for folders you can create, a new folder.

Clicking on add folder.

You can create a new folder by adding a folder here, choosing a new one under that route that you have chosen before that you have set up before.

But what I actually recommend, especially for you, that you're getting started, is for you to create a project.

And what is the difference between a project and a folder?

The project will be pretty much already set up by Claude automatically as a folder that also contains your memory and an explanation automatically.

You can do that manually.

Let's say you start a new folder with Claude cowork and inside, you ask Claude for creating a memory file inside that folder and Claude MD file inside that folder.

And whenever you are performing new actions in that session, you ask it to keep updating that you can definitely do that.

Or if you create a new project, that will be done already, automatically.

So you create new project, sorry and you name it, let's say content Creation, you can describe it and you can actually add folders to it.

So this is the best of the two words.

You create a project or you use a previous project that for something that is recurring for you.

So let's say you're going to use cloud co work for I don't know, emailing, sorting or email inbox management.

So you create a project for that and you create a folder for that.

So you link that folder to the project and on cloud cowork you're only going to use as a project.

So let's say We want to create a email management project.

This project is about managing my email.

And we're gonna add a folder to it and as I said before we can definitely create a new one.

So we are here inside that root and I'll go new folder, email management folder.

Now that that is inside our root we open it.

If you had files that were in previous folders or on your downloads, you can actually add it here.

and you can actually do some instructions for this specific project as well.

and you'd hit create project.

Let's do it.

Now you are inside a project under your cowork.

You can keep editing the instructions and the context memory and scheduling here.

Now all or as you go.

And we are very getting very close to actually delegating our first task.

So we have gone through chat and co work project and folder.

This is pretty self explanatory.

as you are going back and forth with Claude, you want to manually approve each action it needs to take.

Automatically approved means it's only going to ask you for approval when Claude understands that there is some risk to it and skip all approvals.

That's normally something that I do not use is Claude never stops even if there is some unsafe or risk to it.

So I recommend you starting with manually approval the model.

of course you're going to be tempted to go with Fable because I can.

Well we can have discussions or videos only about models.

Right?

Fable is the best but also consumes most of your tokens.

So you're going to reach your limits much faster, 50% faster.

So what I recommend you to do is when you're starting a more complex task, you use Fable to actually plan it.

So when you're giving your prompt here, your command, you're not going to ask for execution, you're going to ask for a plan to tackle that issue or that challenge that you have once you have that done then you change for Opals or Sonnet to actually execute that plan.

The that's the best way for you to manage your tokens while also achieving a great result effort as well.

Higher effort means more not only better responses but also takes longer and use more of your tokens.

Limits you have previous modules here that are probably not going to use.

And if you want to see how close you are to your limit under settings you go to usage and you can see this three main limits here.

The current session that is normally something like the next six or seven hours, something like this.

then you have limits as well for all models.

And just for Fable, you can buy more credits here as well.

But you probably want to mine this one and this one.

Okay.

And it also tells you when it's going to reset.

So my current session, the few hours one is going to reset in 28 minutes.

and my weekly one is going to reset one week from now.

Actually it just restarted.

All right, now for some very interesting stuff.

When you click this sign here, there are a few things I want to talk to you about.

Of course you can add files to your demand here.

but I want to focus on skills.

Connectors and plugins, specifically skills and connectors.

What are skills?

Skill is a method that you have either developed or took took from someone else who develop it to do something.

So you want to think about it like this.

You have skills on one side and connectors on the other.

Skills.

As I said the method a workflow to do something and you can evoke that workflow or that skill by just typing slash and the name of the skill I'm going to get to that.

The connector on the other hand is a access to another application, another software.

So you have a connector to Google Drive, a connector to Google Gmail, a connector to HubSpot and to many, many, many applications.

Probably the ones that you use the most on your work, you do have a connection already.

and it's quite easy to set up and that's what give Claude access to that.

So you can use on skills or not on skills.

But in this example let's use skills, you can use that connector with a skill.

So if you have a skill that is about the copywriting of email marketing campaign, right?

and let's say just for the sake of this example that you are going to use Gmail to send in the emails for that campaign, in reality you won't.

But just for the sake of this example they skew will teach Claude is teaching Claude how to perform, how to actually deliver a good copy, what it should take into account and what connectors or connector it should use for that.

And one of the connectors might be in this case let's say Google Gmail as it will finalize the skill by saving a draft with the copy on your emails draft.

Or it can use let's say notion skill to grab information about the.

Your.

Your lead that is saved on your notion database.

That happens with skills and connectors.

Now plugins is it's a bundle of one or more SKU and or one or more connector.

So normally the plugin has multiple SKUs in it and at least one connector in it.

So back to here in skills you can see there are some pre determined skills here.

You might have some because those here are from entropic native skills.

So you have a skill to create other skills.

So whenever you develop something, let's say you develop a new way of coming up with ideas for new posts on social media.

When that happens on a cowork session you can use this skill like this skill creator.

Please turn this session into a new skill called and then Claude will use that skill creator to come up with a new skill that will have a name that you can evoke by doing that then you can invoke by name of the skill to perform a given action.

You can also browse and manage skills.

So browser you can search here or you can see those predetermined ones from Anthropic you see Anthropic the creator of Claude already have some skills for you.

Connectors on the other hand as I said those are access to other pieces of software.

So as you can see notion is one that I don't have and it's quite popular so I should click on the connection button here to connect to it.

But here you have all the most famous ones.

So if we look for Google you're going to see that you have Google Drive, Google Calendar, and even Gmail.

you don't see the plus sign here because I already have those connectors myself.

and when you click.

And plugins as you can see you also have some from Tropic here.

If you click on it you're going to see that you have so this productivity plugin here for task management, planning your day, blah blah blah.

You have four skills and eight connectors in it.

So as I said is a bundle, a collection of ones.

there is also ways for you to add connectors for instance so you can browse or add custom connections.

and normally it's as easy as.

So instead of using Loom, I use myself Tella for video recording and here the MCP of Tella.

So if I copy here and paste it here Tella TV and edit, It's gonna prompt me to log in and approve it.

See, here we go.

And I would allow access.

I'm not gonna do it because I already have it.

but this is the kind of, this is the way that you add custom connector for skill.

There's one observation that is nice.

I've taught you how to create a new skill.

there are two other things about it that are very interesting.

One is you can turn, you can use a skew on schedule and I'm gonna talk about it when you're talking about scheduling the tasks and also in the example that we're going to perform.

But also I told you how to create a new skill.

There's a one very new way which is record, so CLAUDE has launched this new feature that you start recording and it will capture your screen.

It's a video recording of your screen, of your microphone.

So it's like you're sending a video for a colleague or a co worker, teaching how to do something and it's video recording, taking screenshots and matching that to what you're saying, and transforming that into a skill.

To be quite frank, I don't use that very often because.

I've seen people using it for applications that you don't have a connector yet.

So let's say you're teaching Claude a skill of, I, don't know, doing something on YouTube for you.

like I don't know, maybe getting your views count.

You don't have a connector of YouTube to Claude, but you have other applications Such as Composio that do have a connection to your YouTube there and they also connect to Claude.

So it's a better way for you to create a skill, using proper connectors.

In this case you'd be using YouTube through the connection of Composio rather than recording a video showing Claude how to go online on your Google Chrome, and doing stuff on your tab for you.

So that's why I don't want to put a lot of recommendation to this.

I would still go with using proper connectors and creating the SKU that uses proper connectors.

So this is not going to be the final example, but let's start with something.

At this point you have already connected few connectors, right?

And I hope that you have added Google Drive and Gmail because I've shown you how to.

Again it's probably going to be listed here.

You can also add by browsing it and looking for Gmail Drive.

So for you there should be a plus sign here that when you do click on connect, it's gonna prompt you to log in with your credentials of Gmail credentials.

But that's all you need.

So let's ask for something that we know Claude is gonna have to use the connectors.

So let's say can you read my last five emails on my inbox and let's do three so it's faster and summarize each in one sentence for me.

Rank it by urgency.

It's gonna asking for permission.

Probably gonna have only gonna happen only one time.

Since we have it added as menu.

here the type of approval, you're gonna have to be here and click on approve a few times because it's.

I should not have used Fable.

Let's go with Sonic.

So live demonstration.

You can actually change the model.

in the middle of something.

As you can see it's searching my email, retrieving specific threads and there we go.

I have some email marketing emails here.

firefighters for my note taking and another email marketing actually newsletter I received now good.

now I liked your summary for each email.

Can you use skill creator and create and turn this into a SKU for me Meaning the search of less.

Read or unread and summarizing into one sentence or paragraph max and ranking.

Sorting it from the most urgent one.

So this is how Claude has used one skill.

Sorry one connection which was the Gmail connector.

And now we are using, or we are using a skill.

There's a skill created to create a new skill for us.

So I can always use this skill that will allow me to expect Claude to always perform this.

This action that we are asking it to perform in a very predictable way.

And that's what it's doing, you see?

So it's finished, or it's finishing now.

And it gave us the file, markdown file with the skill.

So you would go through all of this to see if it's matching what you wanted to, and you would click on Save skill to save it as a skill.

Let's do it.

Save skill.

Close it.

And now you can invoke that by just slash inbox triage.

See, that's the skill it created.

And now it's here.

Kudos.

Now we're getting to the end of the video.

Let's say this is a new day.

You open your Claude app on your desktop again to do something.

Here's the things that I want you to check before we go to the final example that you're going to love it.

You want to check if this task that you're about to run is running in the cloud.

This means using Claude's servers, not on your computer.

That will rely on your computer being awake.

In this case we're going to use the project that we had set up just now.

let's do, let's change for automatically approve and let's not use Fable because we don't need to.

Let's go for Sonnet because we're going to perform an action, not plan for anything.

What I once done now is I created this example here of a company called Northwind, and I have the invoices for that company.

So as you can see the clients are here.

Invoice number, or invoice unique identifier the amount and the status and also a due date.

Something that a lot of companies will have.

Some will be a simple Google sheet like this.

Some others will have this on Stripe for instance and you have a Stripe connector.

in this case we would be using a Google Drive connector or we will be using some on maybe CRM.

So let's say you use HubSpot and that's what you have those things being tracked.

So I'll give this prompt here, read my Google Drive sheet.

This is the name.

Find every invoice with status unpaid for each draft.

A short polite but firm follow up email in Gmail with the invoice number, amount and due date.

This is demo data with no real addresses.

So use placeholder recipient like clientxample um.com because in reality you would have probably either email or phone number or some way of contacting your clients that is not through fhir.

Save each as a draft, do not send anything, then list what you have drafted.

And the thing is this will be, I think this is a very good example for you to get started with it and you're probably already thinking I, I can transform that into my reality.

And yes, you can turn this into a skill and you can turn this into a schedule, a repetitive task that happens on every X.

You know when I get, we're gonna get to that.

And you can also have approve mode approval, step what we would call human in the loop of an automation where with your phone now you can open Claude's application and approve the steps when it's running.

Let's say it's every week or every end of the month.

So let's do it and see what happens.

Here's the response.

I found three unpaid invoices and saved a draft follow up email for each.

Here's the summary.

We had set it up to auto.

That's why he didn't ask for our approval to turn into a skill.

We can turn this into a manual approval but the key thing here is did it send those emails or did it save as drafts?

That's probably what you're wondering right.

As you can see it's here on my draft those three emails you see here draft and those are correct.

So just like how we would expect.

Something about the connectors that I haven't mentioned but it's quite important for you to understand when you click on the connector Gmail for instance it's going to show you the tools permissions within that connector.

So for the read only tools I have always allow so I don't need to approve anything.

When Claude decides to use it for read only for write and delete tools I have it as need approval so it will always ask for my approval before it writes or deletes anything.

That's how I recommend you set it up as well.

You can also be more you can also customize it more.

So let's say You see they don't even have the option to send emails here for you.

So it's only add sensitive label, trash or span to a message to a thread.

Create a new draft email in the user's account.

Create a new label, add labels to message, add labels to thread, remove label, remove labels from thread.

so for instance if those two here you find it too sensitive, you can block like not even if it asks.

It's not going to even ask for you to approve.

It's completely blocked.

So up to you.

But don't, don't be afraid.

Gmail is not gonna Clouds are gonna use your Gmail to send.

Now we can go to.

Okay, thanks.

I have sent those emails.

How can I turn this into a skew and have it run every.

Monday 9:00am so we don't really need it but let's.

I'll switch to oppos here for us to use another model and let's ask this message in the meantime I Want you to go to scheduled here this page and you can see that you can create yourself here and search yourself for new scheduled tasks.

So this is how you would search for new ones.

You want to have this task set to run on your computer only run while it's awake and online.

so you want this keep awake but we're going to be using or creating a new task and we're gonna go back to the question that we just asked Cloud cowork But if you want to manually create one you can go here new task set up manually and here you would give a name to the repetitive task or schedule task.

here is where you teach it and the frequency.

And here is the thing run on your computer.

Default is null and that's a good thing because the task that we're going to create and the routine or and even the SKU we have created before we don't need it to use any file on our local machine on our local Mac and that's for the best because we don't need the computer to be awake.

It's only going going to use cloud servers and the connectors that it has connected.

So we want this to be turned off so your schedule and your skill will not be prevented or stopped from running because your computer is not awake.

let's cancel this for now and go back to the session with Claude co work and see I'm having now Claude walk us through and actually guiding us to create those two separate pieces and it's saying two separate pieces here a SKU reusable package instructions I prefer to call it the method and I schedule tasks the thing that actually fires every Monday 9am Before I build them.

Two decisions that change how it behaves and both are consequential enough that I don't want to guess when the task runs automatically to Monday.

What should we do with the follow up emails draft only the demo sheet has no email addresses.

Ue is placed what should we the weekly task point at?

Keep demo.

Let's for now keep the demo and in the meantime So as we are now familiar with it give us an MD file there's a skill and ideally you would read it all but this is just an example so I'm going to save okay, it's created and then it's creating the task for us or the scheduled task sorry and telling it what to do and to run every Monday at 9am let's schedule it creating the trigger etc.

And Actually I already thought of something.

I want the task to finish by.

Sending me messages on Slack telling me it created X.

In emails that are now on my left.

Please update the scheduled task.

or actually you can ask Claude actually is it better to change the schedule task or the skill itself?

Let's see.

So it's recommending us to actually change the schedule task, not the skill.

because it's just a ping notification.

So let's update it and even though it is scheduled to run on Monday 9am, we're gonna run it manually just so you can see.

All right, so if we go now to our schedule page, scheduling page, you can see it here.

Weekly invoice, follow ups and you can see the clouds symbol here.

Other old schedules that I have, they have the local machine Symbol.

So you see running this task requires your computer to be on the one that we just created.

Will not require that.

You see now we can run it and see what happens.

By the way, you can see here that you can change from manually approved to automatically approve and also the module we're not gonna change that.

So run now.

And when you click on run now opens a new session here.

And the beauty of this is since this is being run on the cloud, not using your computer at all.

I'm using my phone now to record this.

If I wasn't, this would be running I could be approving this just like I'll be approving now here in a second.

Because it's manually approved, I could be approving this on my phone.

So you, when you're running your business and you have automation or scheduled tasks like this, you can also have it approved on your on your phone.

So on the go you are working on having, having AI work to you for you on the go.

Let's allow, Let's allow it all.

So you see it finished and, and That actually see just now it actually sent using Claude to me.

So it's working.

So hopefully this was useful for you.

if you have the impression that sounds and looks very simple.

That's because it is, it just didn't look before because you haven't tried it.

if it looks scary, I promise you it's not.

you have probably been overwhelmed with the amount of news and Reels or TikTok Instagram posts, whatever about AI.

And you are like almost with a fear of missing out, especially for your business.

I think, I strongly believe and in this video I'VE tried to show you why the cloud cowork is probably the best, one of the best ways for you to get started with AI on your business.

Going from, I just chat with ChatGPT, I ask silly questions or, I asked to translate something to the next step, which is having AI do stuff for you, delegates manage it.

so you delegate, so you manage it and have AI do stuff for you, even on demand, even when you're not on your computer and etc.

I strongly believe if you follow along this video and you do the stuff that I did here, this is gonna open up your brain so much that you're going to start doing stuff.

if I can do this, then I can do that as well, and I can do that as well.

And the beauty of it is you can keep following up, keep asking, AI, what if that, what if?

That's.

How's the best way for you to do this, this, that.

And when you see it, within a week, your learning curve is just ridiculous and you're going to be using it on your business a lot.

So, if anything, the risk is you go from spending $0 or $20 on a AI a month, and we will be spending $100 on AI a month.

That's probably the worst that can happen.

I would love for you to drop a comment, subscribe like, and see you on the next one.

Cheers.