--- title: 'How to Use Claude Co-work: Complete Tutorial for Beginners' source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=AxN7wkYRexQ' video_id: 'AxN7wkYRexQ' date: 2026-07-14 duration_sec: 0 --- # How to Use Claude Co-work: Complete Tutorial for Beginners > Source: [How to Use Claude Co-work: Complete Tutorial for Beginners](https://youtube.com/watch?v=AxN7wkYRexQ) ## Summary This video provides a step-by-step tutorial on using Claude Co-work, a mode within the Claude desktop app that acts as a personal assistant to automate tasks on your computer. The host demonstrates how to set up Co-work, connect apps, and use features like scheduled tasks and projects to save time on repetitive work. ### Key Points - **What is Co-work?** [00:00] — Co-work is a mode in the Claude desktop app that goes beyond chat by allowing Claude to perform actions on your computer, such as creating files, organizing folders, searching the web, and connecting to email and other tools. - **Download and Setup** [01:30] — Download the Claude desktop app from claude.ai/download, choose Mac or Windows, and install. A paid Claude plan (Pro, Max, Team, or Enterprise) is required to use Co-work. - **Co-work Interface** [03:00] — After logging in, select Co-work mode. The interface includes options for scheduled tasks, projects, dispatch, ideas, and customize. Start a new task by selecting a folder on your computer. - **First Task: Meal Plan** [04:30] — Create a weekly meal plan saved as a spreadsheet. Choose a folder, select AI model (e.g., Sonnet 4.6), and provide a prompt. Claude may ask follow-up questions and then generates the file. - **Connectors and Settings** [07:00] — Go to settings to connect apps like Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, and Chrome. These integrations allow Claude to save files, send emails, check calendars, and browse the web. - **Organizing Screenshots** [09:00] — Use Co-work to organize messy folders. For example, give it a folder of screenshots and ask it to rename and categorize them. It creates subfolders and renames files descriptively. - **Email Automation** [11:00] — With Gmail connected, Claude can draft and send emails. It can also summarize your inbox and draft responses. Example: 'Write an email to charlie@pair.so asking about new hires for video editing.' - **Scheduled Tasks** [13:00] — Set up recurring tasks (daily, weekly, etc.) that run automatically when your computer is on. Example: daily Instagram reel script generation at 9 AM. Tasks can be edited or run manually. - **Projects** [16:00] — Projects are for ongoing work with persistent context. Add files, instructions, skills, and connectors. Example: a blog project with writing style files and instructions for consistent output. - **Dispatch** [18:00] — Dispatch allows you to control Co-work from your phone via the Claude app. You can send tasks to your desktop computer remotely, even from a different location. - **Creating MD Skill Files** [20:00] — Create MD files that capture your style (e.g., email writing style) by analyzing your past work. These files improve Claude's outputs by providing personalized context. ### Conclusion Claude Co-work is a powerful tool for automating computer tasks, from organizing files to managing emails. By setting up connectors, scheduled tasks, and projects, users can significantly boost productivity with minimal technical effort. ## Transcript My name is Charlie and in this video I'm going to show you how to use Claude Co-work. If you haven't heard of it yet, Co-work is basically like having a personal assistant right on your computer. It can create documents, spreadsheets presentations organize files, do research, and a ton of other stuff. And the best part is you don't need to be technical at all to use it. If you guys follow along step by step with this video, you're going to be up and running in about 10 minutes. So whether you're a business owner or a content creator, a student, or you just want to get more done with AI, this video is for you. Let's get started. Okay, first let's talk about what co-work is. Here's a quick plain English explanation. Co-work is a mode inside the Claude desktop app that goes way beyond just like chatting with AI. So instead of just answering questions, Claude can actually do things on your computer. It can create files. It can work with your folders. It can search the web, connect to your email and other tools. And really, it's for anyone who wants to save time on repetitive or tedious tasks. So the key difference from regular cloud chat is you give it a task, it goes and does the work and you come back to finished files sitting on your computer. So let me show you guys exactly how to set this up. So first you're going to download the Cloud Desktop app. And to do that you're going to go to cloud.ai/d download. There's Mac OS and Windows options. So just choose accordingly and you're going to click download for your operating system. On Mac you're going to just drag to your applications folder. On Windows you're going to run the installer. Now, I will say you do need to have a paid claude plan to use co-work. So, you can choose the pro, max, team, or enterprise plans. For most of you guys watching this, I think the pro is going to be perfect to start. Yeah, essentially, if you are on the free plan, you won't actually see the co-work option. But guys, this 20 $25 is the best money you'll ever spend. It is highly worth it. Once your app is open, you're going to log into your Claude account or create your account. Once you're logged in, it's going to look something just like this. Really clean interface. And if you come up here to the top, you can see we have the chat, co-work, and code modes. So chat, you guys already know how to use this. It is just like chat GPT. Now, let's click on co-work. And yeah, this is what the interface looks like in the co-work mode. You can see we have a few new different things here. We have scheduled, we have projects, we have dispatch, and we also have ideas and customize. Over here is we're going to start a new task. You can either just go straight here, or you can click on this button. So now, let me show you guys how this actually works. What we'll do is we'll click on this button right here. And as you can see, we can choose from different folders to work in. These are actual folders on your computer. And so in this case, I'll click on this. Let's go to choose a different folder. And what I recommend doing is creating a folder on your computer somewhere. Name it cla or co-work or something like that. So we'll click on this one and I'm going to create a new folder. Let's just call it tasks. I'll click on open. And now it's going to ask me if it can actually change files in this folder. I'm going to select always allow. And now anything we do in this task is going to happen in this tasks folder. Seriously, don't make the mistake of not creating a folder and just having it on your hard drive. We actually want to contain it into this one specific folder. It's going to be a lot more organized and it's just going to be a lot better. Now, whatever folder you select, Claude's actually going to be able to read files in that folder as well as save new files to it. So, if you want Claude to work with something that you already have, for example, like a spreadsheet or document, just put it in that folder. Okay. So now let's give Claude our first task. Let's do something like create a weekly meal plan for the next 7 days and save it as a spreadsheet. So here you're going to be able to select which AI model you want to use. As of right now we have Opus 4.6, Sonet 4.6, Haiku 4.5. And basically the higher up this list you choose, the more tokens it's going to use. It's definitely possible to run out of tokens, especially if you're using the top tier AI model. So, what I would say is for really highly complex and thinking tasks, use Opus. For more everyday tasks, I just probably go with 4.6. And then if you just want quick answers, just go with this one. These might change by the time you are watching this video, but just choose accordingly. So, for something like this, I would just go with 4.6. You don't need the top tier LLM for this one. So, let's click on let's go. And it's very similar to Claude or Chatg in the more detail you give it in this prompt, the better of an output. So, for example, I could have told it to create these types of meals or with these ingredients or let's say I want to hit these certain macros. I'd tell it all those specific details, and it's going to give me a much more specific meal plan. Sometimes, it's going to ask you follow-up questions if you have a pretty generic prompt. So, as you can see, in this case, it's asking if I have any dietary preferences or restrictions. I'll say no restrictions. And how much cooking time do you typically have on weekdays? Let's select quick. It's going to take those answers and then run with it. Now, it's going to actually go through these things. So you can see it's going through these different steps right here. So it's pretty interesting to see them being done. Okay, cool. So now it's done with our meal plan. We can click to view the meal plan here or as you guys can see within our tasks folder, we have this spreadsheet already created. So I can click on this here and this is the weekly meal plan that it's created. Really, really cool cuz it's not just giving us text, it's giving us an actual document. Now, before I get into a little bit more complex things, because I just wanted to show you guys how it works on your computer, what you guys should really do is come here, click on your name, go to settings, and what I recommend doing is just going through all of these. One really important one is going to be connectors. And depending on when you're watching this video, it might be a little bit different. They're actually moving this to customize right here. So, I'll show you that in just a second, but basically, you can see we can connect different apps and services to Cloud. So, I can have a lot more functionality. As you can see, right now I have my Google Drive connected as well as a GitHub integration. With Google Drive, this means that it can actually save things directly to my Google Drive folder. Gmail is also installed, so it can send and receive emails for me. I can have it draft up responses. Google Calendar is also connected, meaning it can look at my calendar. It can tell me what events I have on a certain date, and I can also tell it to send out event invites to other people. We also have Claude and Chrome, which I recommend. This is how it's going to be able to actually use Chrome for you. So, yes, the AI can actually browse the web and go through different websites in your own Chrome browser. You can also add a custom connector here, but I'm not going to talk about that. It's a little bit more complex. If you come here to co-work, so there's an option for dispatch, which I have connected. This basically means you're going to download the Claude app on your phone, and you're going to actually be able to use your desktop co-work from your phone. So, as long as this computer right here is on and open, I could be thousands of miles away on my phone and actually have it do work on my computer. So, super super cool. Now, let's come here to customize. And as you can see, we have different skills and different connectors. Connectors we already talked about. So, if I click on this, you can see we currently have these connectors here. If you click on this plus button right here, we can browse different connectors. It's very likely that whatever apps you use will be here. So, if you want to integrate any of these, all you'll do is click on the plus button right here. I actually like to sort by popular. And let's say you want to do something like this PowerPoint. You'll click on this button right here, click on install, and it's going to install it. So, go through these, figure out what apps you want to connect and connect them. So, plugins basically transform the AI into specialized agents by giving it custom instructions and tools. So, for example, if you want to use Claude for legal work, probably want to click on this button right here. If you want to use it for marketing, click on it. And once it's installed, you're going to have these more specialized agents for these particular uses. That brings me to skills, which is also very, very important. So, you can go ahead and search for different skills here and just add them very easily. Okay, so now let's try a different task. I'm going to choose a different folder, and I'm going to go to this folder right here, screenshots. I basically have a bunch of screenshots that I want to actually organize for me. I think most of you guys watching this will have this issue where you have a bajillion screenshots on your computer. They're just super messy. You don't know what is what. I'm actually going to have it organized and rename them for me. For this, I'm going to use Opus 4.6. And we'll click on let's go. So, now it's going to actually go through those screenshots in that folder and perform this task for me. Cool. So, now it's done organizing these 27 screenshots. You guys will probably have a lot more, so it will take a little bit longer. But now, if I go back to that folder, you can see it's in all these different folders. If I click on any of these, so for example, let's do this one. It's going to have a date as well as what that screenshot actually is. So, super super cool. I highly recommend doing this. This is probably something that applies to most of you guys watching. Now, just one example of how Claude can actually go through your folders, organize things for you, and with some creativity, you can basically do this on any folder in your computer. Some of you guys might have a really messy desktop. Please have Claude go and organize it for you. Okay, so another use case is going to be this. So, if I go to new task, let's do something like this. Write an email to charlie@pair.so asking if there are any new hires available that can help with my video editing. This one doesn't require a folder, so we'll just leave it as is. And we'll click on let's go. Since I've connected my Gmail under the connectors, now it can actually send emails for me. Cool. So, you can see that it's actually drafted an email. And as you can see, it is here. The draft is here. It looks pretty good. And I can directly click send right here. So, yeah, I think this looks good. And we'll click on send. You can also say stuff like look through my inbox for the last 24 hours. And let me know if there are any important emails. All right. So, it's actually gone through and given me a really good summary of the emails I've got for the last 24 hours. This is a really good way to just check all your emails really fast once per day. And if there's any of them that I want to actually have it draft an email response for, I can easily do that right here. So, let me show you guys how to set up a scheduled task. That's one of my favorite features. And basically, you can set Claude to do something automatically every single day, every week, or whatever you want. So, I'll come here to scheduled. And what we'll do is we'll click on new task. Please note that these will only execute if your computer is open and wait. So let's create something called IG real script. Script for an Instagram reel. This doesn't matter too much. Write a viral Instagram reel about business or personal finance. Should be between 15 to 45 seconds long. And also prompt me for what topic I want to talk about today. So frequency, you're going to select either hourly, daily, weekdays, weekly. Let's set it for daily. We'll set it for 9:00 a.m. There's also other options. So you can select which model you want to use. We'll leave it as default. And you can also have it work in a specific folder. So let's have it work in tasks. Actually, under tasks, I'm going to create another folder called IG Reels. And let's actually use that folder. IG reels. Cool. Now, click on save. And now this scheduled task is going to show up right here. So this is supposed to happen at 9:00 a.m. And since it's past that, it's not going to run. But I can actually just run this manually by clicking on it and clicking run. Now you can also edit it. So you can edit the instructions. I recommend making it a bit more detailed. You can also delete it by clicking on this trash can. But let's click run now. So, it's running and now you're going to see it show up right here. So, if I click on this right here, you can see it's running. There's many different things you guys can use this for. One thing that a lot of people do is they'll have an email assistant. So, you can set it to go through your emails every single day at, let's say, 9:00 a.m., 12:00 p.m., 3:00 p.m., and let's say 7:00 p.m. It can create an email brief and send it to you. And then, now going back to here, this is our script. If you come here to the IG reels folder, we can now see that reel right here. This is a MD file which you guys are going to start getting used to. It's basically like a doc file and here is the script. So yeah, tons of other stuff you guys can do with this scheduled function. Highly highly recommend using that. Next, let's talk about projects. So if you come back to the projects tab, we'll click on new project. And this is basically going to be a place for like ongoing work where context builds over time. So what you're going to do is you're going to have this project and then you're going to put files and instructions that are looked at for every single thing you run in this project. Let's click start from scratch. Let's write something like blog. We can give it some instructions. So this is super super basic for now, but I'm just doing it as a demo. This is where you're going to add different files. So you can give more context. You can give other types of blogs you've written before. You can give MD files and skills. And you're also going to select a project location. Let's do a new folder called blog. And now let's click create. So now in this one project area, you're going to be able to, you know, set off a certain task. It's going to be within this blog project. We can, of course, add different files, skills, connectors, plugins here. We can also create scheduled tasks within this project. And you can also always add new, more detailed instructions, which is what I recommend to do over time. An example of something I'd use this for is, let's say I have a blog. I want everything about this blog to be in this project. It's going to have a lot of context of how I write these certain blog articles, the topics that I talk about, instructions and all that stuff. All that stuff would be done within this project. Another would be, let's say you are planning a wedding. I would do a wedding project and then I would have everything relating to wedding planning and stuff in this project. It's very similar to projects within chat GPT. Now, let's talk about dispatch. So, I sort of talked about this already, but it's a cool way to use co-work when you are not at home and you don't have your computer. So, I'm on my phone right now and I already have dispatch set up. Very easy to do. It's going to just take you through the instructions. So, if I click on dispatch, you'll be able to see I can talk to this computer right here from my phone. I don't need to be on the same Wi-Fi. I could be somewhere completely different across the world. And I'll be able to actually instruct co-work to do things for me on this computer. So, I'm gonna say create a new folder called dispatch within the tasks folder. As you can see, that message has popped up right here. And so it's kind of similar to OpenClaw where, you know, you message something and it can actually do stuff on your computer. But it's cool that it's all built within Claw. If you want to keep your computer awake at all times, you'll want to select this button right here. Okay, so you can see it needs a little bit more information. I probably picked a bad example for this, but you guys get the point. Now, one way I really like using Co-work is by actually creating my own MD files. So these are basically skills, and you can actually use Claude to create them. So, for example, I'm going to create a folder called MD files. And what I'm going to have it do is this. Look through my email sent folder for the last two weeks and create an MD file on how I type. Let's create an email skill. We'll click on let's go. Now, if you guys also create content, I recommend putting different content and creating MD files for that specific type of content. For example, give it, let's say, 20 different Instagram reels that you filmed or give it 20 different scripts and say create an MD file and let's call it Instagram real scripting. Now, whenever you want to have Claude write you Instagram real scripts, what you'll want to do is give it that MD file because that's really, really good context and it's going to create a lot better scripts. The reason for that is because it's literally trained on your scripting. I also recommend going through co-work and having it interview yourself. create a UMD file, which is basically an MD file with all of your opinions, how you talk, what you think, your background, your history, all that stuff. The more of these like MD file skills you have, the better outputs you're going to get from Claude. So, it's given me my signature style. We'll just select draft new emails. And we'll say it looks great. And now we have this MD file. Now, let's say I want to draft a document that is an email I want to send using my MD file. One way you can do it is actually add the MD file right here. So you can go here, go to MD files, and then put that MD file here. Or what you can do is just have it have access to your MD files folder. And so for example, I'm going to remove this. And I'm going to say reference the email skill MD file and write me an email in a word doc. Cool. So email should be 200 words asking Charlie what his plans are for this weekend. Let's click on let's go. Now, one thing I'll say about Cowwork as this is going is that it uses more tokens than chat. So, just be aware if you don't have that many tokens, I might just use chat, especially if you don't need it to actually access or write files on your computer. Chat is also still very, very good. Cool. So, now let's go to our folder. Cool. So, now we can see we have this doc with this email. And of course, I probably wouldn't do it this way. I'd just have it straight drafted to my email. I just want to show you this use case where you can create docs using MD files. If I were to write an email using an MD file skill, I wouldn't use co-work. I'd actually just use chat because it also has access to your Google Gmail. And yeah, that's a pretty good overview of how to use co-work. It's very similar to chat. And the main thing that's different is it has access to your computer. So, I really recommend playing around with co-work. There are so many different things you can do with it. And now that you've watched this video, you're going to have a really good basic understanding on how to use co-work properly. Everything should be set up and ready to go. And from here on, I just start giving it a lot of tasks. Create a bunch of different scheduled tasks, create some projects, create some MD skill files, and you'll be surprised at what you can do. Hopefully, you guys found this tutorial helpful. I'm also going to link my school community down below. It's completely free to join. And I'll also link some of my favorite AI tools because, yeah, AI tools go way beyond co-work. There are so many other great tools that you can use in your life. And so, I'll make sure to put those down below in the description. Congrats on making this far. You guys are absolutely awesome. If you guys got any value from the video, make sure to hit that like button. And if you want to see more videos just like this, make sure to subscribe. I create a ton of videos about entrepreneurship, finance, AI, and my whole goal is to help you guys live a financially successful life. Again, thank you so much for your time and I'll see you in the next video. Peace.