Claude Cowork: The Tool You're Not Using (and That Changes Everything)

In the last edition, I gave you a complete tour of the Claude ecosystem.

Why everyone is switching to Claude (and what you're missing)

But one section deserved much more than a paragraph: Claude Cowork

It's probably the most underestimated feature of Claude, and yet it's the one that changes how we work day to day the most.

If you only use Claude in chat mode, you're missing the essentials. The chat is an assistant that answers your questions. You copy the text, and you go do the work yourself.

Claude Code is more for developers, more complex to get to grips with.

Cowork is something else: an employee that carries out complete tasks on your computer. You describe the expected result, you go off and do something else, and you come back to a finished file in your folder. Real Excel files with formulas, PowerPoint presentations with clean formatting, Word documents ready to send. Not text in a chat that you have to copy-paste and reformat.

To tell the 3 modes apart, take a look at this cheat sheet:

This edition is a complete playbook. We'll configure the space together, understand each building block, and you'll leave with a working setup.

Setting up your Cowork space

Before starting, here's how to access Cowork:

1️⃣ Download the Claude desktop app (Cowork doesn't work in the browser)

2️⃣ Have a paid account, at least 20€/month with Pro

3️⃣ Open the app and click the Cowork tab between Chat and Code

4️⃣ Select Opus 4.6 and enable extended thinking for better results

Now, the most important part: structuring your working folder.

Forget prompts, think context!

In using AI models, we've mostly written a lot of increasingly long prompts. More details, more constraints, more examples. And it works, in a classic chat.

Cowork completely changes the logic. The game is no longer the prompt. It's the context you make available to Claude, in the form of files.

The principle: you select a folder on your computer, and Claude can read everything in it. Your documents, your notes, your past examples, your templates. It understands your environment without you having to re-explain everything you've already documented.

Concretely, that means your prompt can be 2 lines. If the folder is well structured, Claude already knows who you are, how you work, and what level of quality you expect.

The whole challenge is then to organize your workspace well, and that's exactly what we're going to see.

It's the most important step. If you remember just one thing: spend 20 minutes on your context files, and every Cowork session will be better.

The folder logic

First rule: never point Claude to all your documents. Cowork has real read and write access to the folder you share. If something goes wrong, you want the damage contained within a limited scope. And above all, a folder that's too broad = too much noise. Claude will read useless files and consume tokens for nothing.

So create a dedicated folder, for example “Cowork”, and give access only to that one.

Inside, it's best to create 3 subfolders:

• CONTEXTE: what Claude needs to know about you before each task. It's the most important folder, the one that turns a generic AI model into a more personalized tool.
• PROJETS: your ongoing projects. One subfolder per project with the brief, the drafts, the reference documents for that specific work. (see example below)
• RÉSULTATS: where Claude drops its finished deliverables. Claude never goes there on its own (it saves tokens), unless you point it to a specific file.

In the CONTEXTE folder, add 3 markdown files (.md):

• a-propos.md : your role, your company, your audience, your current priorities. It's your professional identity card for Claude. No need for a novel: 1 to 2 condensed pages are enough. If the file is too long, Claude summarizes it instead of reading it in detail, and you lose precision.
• tone_of_voice.md : your tone, your style, the words you use, the ones you hate. The writing patterns that make you cringe. If you don't want Claude to write “like an AI”, this is where it happens.
• working-preferences.md : how you like documents to be formatted, how Claude should handle ambiguities, your non-negotiable rules. For example: “always start with an executive summary”, “never more than 15 pages”, “output in .docx”.

In the end, it looks like this:

Important point about document size: keep these 3 files under 4,500 words (about 6,000 tokens), because below that limit, Cowork reads everything at each session. Above it, it starts skimming and summarizing.

To save time, you can ask Claude to interview you to create these files. In a Cowork session, add the following prompt:

I'm setting up my space on Claude Cowork, build my a-propos.md file that gathers all the context to know about me and my activity. Your job is to interview me with 15-20 questions to understand who I am, how I work, and what I consider good work. Ask one question at a time. Then, compile the answers into a condensed markdown file of less than 2000 words.

Claude will ask you targeted questions, with clickable options. You answer in a few minutes, and you get a context file far richer than what you'd have written yourself. A good markdown file is worth more than 50 documents uploaded in bulk.

The global instructions

You can add global instructions on Cowork that Claude will read before each task. Accessible in Settings

Here's an example of instructions to copy-paste:

GLOBAL INSTRUCTIONSBEFORE EACH TASKRead all the files in CONTEXTE/. No task starts without this reading.Never read RESULTATS/ or PROJETS/ unless I point you to a specific file.If the task involves a type of content that has a matching template in TEMPLATES/, first study the structure of that template. Use the structure. Do not copy the content.FOLDER PROTOCOLYou have read folders and one write folder.Read-only: never create, modify or delete anything here:CONTEXTE/ → My identity, my writing rules, everything to know about me and my company.PROJETS/ → My briefs, references and finalized work, organized by project.Write folder: the only place where you deliver your work:RESULTATS/ → Everything you create goes here. Save all deliverables under a subfolder named after the project. Create the subfolder if it doesn't exist yet.NAMING CONVENTIONAll created files must follow this format: project_content-type_v1.extContent types: Newsletter, LinkedIn Post, Brief, Deck, Report. Increment the version number if a file with the same name already exists.OPERATING RULESIf the brief is vague or incomplete, ask me questions before acting. Don't fill the gaps with generic content.Deliver the work. No superfluous commentary unless I ask for it.Never delete files, anywhere.

The key point here: always prompt Claude to understand before executing. As you would with a new colleague, you want it to propose an action plan, identify what it's missing, and validate with you before rushing ahead. It hugely changes the quality of the result.

Concretely, in your prompts, you can add something like “Ask me questions to refine the approach”. This lets you have interactive questions with clickable options.

Skills = your reusable playbooks

It's an important concept I already mentioned in last week's edition, so I'll go over it quickly.

A skill is an instruction file that tells Claude exactly how to handle a type of task. A kind of SOP for the AI.

Cowork has native skills for common files: Excel, PowerPoint, Word, PDF. When you ask for a spreadsheet, Claude automatically activates the Excel skill. Clean formulas, formatting, charts, not just a data dump.

On top of that, you need to create your own custom skills to guide Claude on the rules to follow depending on the tasks.

If it's the 1st time you do a specific task on Claude Cowork and it won't be the last, ask it to create a skill for that specific task

Next time, the same type of task will be executed with the same quality, without re-explaining. The difference between a generic output and an output that sounds like your work is the skill.

Here's an example on generating a sales proposal (you can even see the assets used):

To manage your skills, go to Customize in the left sidebar, then Skills. You can enable, disable, import skills, or create new ones.

Plugins: ready-to-use business skills

Plugins are comparable to skills (Anthropic released 11 official ones: marketing, sales, legal, finance, data, …) Each plugin gives Claude workflows and commands specific to a profession.

They're accessible in the same place as skills and once installed, you can trigger them by typing “/” in the chat to see the available commands. For example: /marketing:draft-content for a LinkedIn post or /data:explore to analyze a CSV.

Projects in Cowork

You've configured your space but the problem is that without a project, each session starts from scratch. There's no memory between sessions EXCEPT if you switch into a project.

Projects in Cowork change this. A project is a persistent workspace with:

• Its own folder (Claude reads and writes in it)
• Custom instructions (tone, rules, format, guardrails)
• Scoped memory (Claude remembers what it did in this project, from one session to the next)
• Scheduled tasks (recurring work, tied to this project)
• A history of all the tasks executed

Scoped memory is the feature that deserves your attention. You say “pick up last week's report” and Claude knows what you're talking about. But only within this project. Your “Newsletter” project knows nothing about your “Sales proposals” project. It's deliberate isolation, and it's a good thing.

How to create a project

In the Claude Desktop app, go to Projects in the left sidebar, then click +. Three options:

1️⃣ Start from scratch, create a new local folder and add your instructions and files

2️⃣ Import from a Claude Chat project if you already have a project in the browser, the files and instructions transfer over

3️⃣ Use an existing folder if you already have a well-structured COWORK folder, you wrap it in a project to add memory and instructions.

Once the project is created, you can launch a first task so Claude “learns” the context of the space:

I just created this project. Read all the files in the folder. Then summarize what you know about this space: what's there, what it's probably for, and the instructions you'll follow. If anything is unclear, ask me questions.

Claude will then have your project's context from day one and as long as you stay in the project. Here's an example on a “LinkedIn” project with the instructions and the context:

At Tandem, for example, we use a dedicated project for writing sales proposals. The folder contains the proposal template, 2-3 examples of proposals that worked well, the current client brief, and the call transcripts.

I drop a new client brief, I open the project, I type:

New client brief in the folder. Create a sales proposal in .docx. Ask me questions first.

Claude reads the brief, compares it to my examples, asks me 3-4 questions (”Budget? Decision timeline? Competitors in the running?”), and produces a .docx directly in my folder. Claude increasingly knows my formatting preferences and the level of detail I expect, even as my sales proposals evolve. It gets better with each session.

Scheduling, Dispatch and Team

Scheduled tasks

You've probably noticed, you can create recurring tasks in Cowork (including within projects).

Very relevant for monitoring, for example, or a morning routine that retrieves your unread emails (via connectors) and other notifications, your calendar of the day's events to generate a concise recap of urgent tasks, and saves it all into a morning-brief.md file

That's at least 30 minutes of prep work done automatically before I even sit down at my desk.

3 points to keep in mind:

• The computer must be on and the Claude Desktop app open. If your machine goes to sleep, the task doesn't run. Adjust your power settings if you want overnight automation.
• Each scheduled task consumes your token capacity. Don't schedule useless tasks.
• Always test manually first. Run the prompt, check the result, adjust, and once satisfied, schedule it.

Dispatch, your phone as a remote control

Dispatch is a fairly recent feature that lets you send a task to Claude from your phone. The workflow runs on your computer, and you receive a notification when it's done.

The setup takes 2 minutes to sync Claude Cowork and your phone, but I'm not super convinced of the value for now. It can be interesting for long tasks (more than 15 or 30 min) but for runs of a few minutes, the value is more limited → happy to hear your feedback in the comments if you've found a relevant use.

Cowork for teams (Enterprise)

Anthropic just announced that Claude Cowork is now available on all paid plans, with controls designed for organization-wide deployment.

What's interesting in Anthropic's early feedback is that the majority of Cowork usage comes from outside the tech teams. Operations, marketing, finance and legal teams use Cowork not for their core work, but for everything around it: project updates, collaboration decks, research sprints.

An example of execution on the sales and finance side:

With results that can range from presentations (PPT), simulations (Excel), interfaces (artifacts), reports (docx)… :

On the enterprise features side, we find:

• Role-based access controls where admins organize users into groups and define who can use which Claude features. You can enable Cowork for certain teams only.
• Per-group budgets. Each team has a spending cap, adjustable from the admin console.
• Usage analytics on Cowork sessions, active users, the skills and connectors used, everything is visible in the admin dashboard.

When skills become shareable across a company, Cowork goes from an individual productivity tool to a shared infrastructure. A skill created by one person can be used by the whole team. If you'd like us to support you on deploying Claude in your organization, we'd be glad to show you what we've done (and our approach).

The limits of Cowork

Before wrapping up the edition, there are still some sticking points:

• No team sharing on Cowork Projects. Projects are local, on your machine. You can't share them with colleagues (for now).
• Local storage only. No cloud sync. If you work on two machines, you don't have access to the same project from both. Dispatch works from the phone, but the files and the memory stay on the desktop.
• High token consumption. A Cowork session is equivalent to 20+ classic chats. The persistent memory and context are worth it, but expect to hit your limits faster on the Pro plan ($20/month). I recommend using Sonnet for simple tasks (brainstorming, formatting, corrections) and saving Opus for the deep work.
• The browser extension is still unstable. Cowork can theoretically control your browser, but it's slow, it sometimes cuts out in the middle of a task, and it burns tokens. I advise against relying on it for now.
• The app must stay open. If you close Claude Desktop, your scheduled tasks stop. Cowork only runs when the app runs.