Set Up Claude Cowork better than 99% of people

So, 2 months ago, I downloaded Claude Cowork to my Mac and stared a blank screen for about 10 minutes [music] before closing it. I had no idea what to do with it. Today, it reads my email, manages my calendar, writes in my voice, and connects to my Notion workspace [music] and second brain. It can create PowerPoint presentations, clean up my desktop, and code entire websites for me. And with the release of scheduled tasks in Cowork, it even works for me while I sleep. The difference? Seven steps. And I'm going to show you exactly what each one is. Trust me, by the end of this video, you'll be ahead of 99% of people using Claude and Cowork on their Mac. And it's only really a morning's work. No code, no tech background needed. If you can install an app and type a sentence, you can do this. Trust me, you have to try it. Even if you've never touched an AI tool, I don't know how to emphasize this enough. You will have a fully working assistant by lunch. And that safety question everyone has, well, should I really let AI touch my stuff? I'll answer that too, properly, so you can trust it. I can't believe I'm just telling everyone this for free. Once you've watched this video, if you'd like to have a fully ready-made version of a Cowork OS system that basically does all of this and more for you and onboards you, leading you through the process, I've been developing my Cowork OS templated system. It's going to build out the entire system for you with all the folders, [music] plugins, and skills. I've created an onboarding coach, a system review, and first week guide, and it literally onboards you to Claude Cowork at a level [music] that I'm going to teach you how to do here and more. And I've designed what I'm calling my flagship feature, a system review that will help you improve Claude Cowork automatically using the system. So, if you want to fast track to your best Claude co-work experience, make sure you go and download co-work OS. If you're watching this in the first couple of weeks of release, click that link below and you'll get early bird access to the templated system from me. And otherwise, well, you can probably just download it now if you turn up a bit later. Enjoy. >> [music] >> Step one, before you do anything else, you'll need to get co-work onto your Mac, or rather, the Claude desktop app. So, you're going to go to claude.com/download and then you're going to click whichever you're using. I'm a Mac user, so that's what I'm demoing. Download the Mac app, drag it onto applications, and open it. That's it. Simple as that. And you'll see something like this. You need to sign up to a Claude account. If you haven't, it's free, but I actually recommend picking the pro plan, which is £15 in the UK a month, and that's a fantastic option. I'm actually paying this max, and I have to say it's the best investment I've made this month. By far, it has 10x'd, or at least 5x'd, the work I've got done. So, it genuinely is a very, very good bet. And what you're going to end up with when you're loaded up and have your account is something looking a bit like this. You'll see there is the chat feature. Now, you're probably used to seeing this if you've used any LLM, and you'll have your projects if you already have a Claude account, which you can work with here. This is what I did years ago online, and all of my old systems are here. But, we're not going to worry about that. We're going to go into the co-work tab. And of course, you have a very pleasing, easy-to-use interface with Claude code if you want it. Now, for those of you that don't know, Claude co-work is designed for your work. It works on your computer in a folder, or in your folders, and it's actually a wrapper which is using the Claude code base model. Now, the first thing you should do once you get into here is set it up in a folder. So, we're going to select a folder to put it in. This is my current one. I've just got it in users and I've called it Claude Co-work. But, we're going to choose a different folder. We're going to go to documents and I'm going to create a new folder here and call it Claude Co-work demo cuz I'm going to show you how to set this up again. So, let's create that. There you go and open it. And I'm going to allow. Now, that means that Claude can only work in that folder. Now, you should think of this folder as your shared work space with Claude. Everything you want Claude to do in Co-work goes in here. Everything you don't stays outside. And that goes for what it can see as well. The next thing I think you should do is click here and select the model you want to work with. I recommend turning on extended thinking. Sonnet is good for most tasks. Opus is absolutely incredible and super powerful, but it will burn through more tokens. I'm on a max plan though and I've been absolutely rinsing it and it's absolutely fine. So, depending on what you choose to pay, it's worth playing with this cuz it is amazing at doing a lot of different tasks. But, yeah, this for faster quick answers. I recommend Sonnet to get started. Opus if you want to do more ambitious projects as it says here. We'll talk about the scheduled task later cuz you got to stick around for that cuz it's probably the best thing. But, there's a lot more we need to do before this truly becomes a personal assistant and it's very easy to do. Before we move to step two though, let's try a simple task to demo Claude Co-work in action. And what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to break my rule immediately. I'm going to go to desktop and I'm going to allow that. Okay. Hey, Claude, I'd like you to go ahead and clean up my desktop or downloads files. Organize them into folders by category and rename anything that might need a better description. If it looks like I've already named it the file, leave it named as it is. And there you go. And actually, I'm just going to say desktop. Make sure you don't touch or do anything to the Claude co-work demo folder. Now, I could set this going and it's going to ask, are you absolutely sure you want to do that? I'm going to say allow. Actually, before you do anything, don't mess with anything that's already within a folder, only files that are on the desktop. I'm just going to clean that up, so it definitely doesn't mess with things. So, as you can see, you can also add a little extra comment in the queue and when it's ready to read it, it will also make sure it checks that. So, it should leave everything that's in folders as they are and then just clean up these files for me. Got it. Only loose files leaving existing folders there. And here we go. Here's what it sees, screenshots, screen recordings, FigJam PDF exports, documents. I'll also clean up these items. Now, as Claude works, you'll see you have this progress view on the right-hand side and you can see the tasks it set itself. So, it's really amazing. This is Opus giving itself a set of tasks and working through it. A really nice thing to do when you're using it is just open this up and see what it's doing. You'll see it's going through its list, following certain bits of information, and that can be a really nice way to work out how it's working. You'll also see instructions that it's read. It's got a Claude MD instruction file that's on the desktop with nothing in it and we'll get round to that in a moment and then context. This will show you any tools it's referenced which we'll get on to in a little bit. Now, if you're unsure about something like this, are you sure you want it to delete something? Well, first of all, great, it's checking, but you can also go, "What files are you asking to delete, please?" And I can just reply to it like that. And there you go. It's really simple. You don't have to agree to anything you don't want and immediately everything cleaned up, labeled, and renamed as needed. So, these reference PDFs have been adapted and dropped in. Fantastic. The other thing I truly recommend using something like this is get yourself a voice transcription or dictation or interface. I use WhisperFlow. I've linked it below and you'll see why cuz it just saves so much [music] time. So, there you go. That is what Claude can do. It can interact with your computer. But right now, CoWork doesn't know anything about you or how you work. It's just a blank slate. Step [music] two is where the real setup starts. Step two is [music] write some global instructions. This is the single most important thing you'll do in the whole setup and it's really easy to miss. CoWork has a settings area down here. If you click on your name and go to settings, you'll see a a bunch of settings and you can look through these and we'll get into these in a moment. But this is where you can write global instructions. So, if you did it here, this would be instructions for everything you do across chat, CoWork, and code and you can absolutely do that, but I recommend potentially having one set of instructions for CoWork. So, you click on the CoWork tab, go to global instructions, and we're going to click edit, and we can create instructions in here. Now, these are rules that it reads at the start of every conversation. Think of it like handling a new assistant a manual on their first day. And this is simply called a Claude.md file. Essentially, a markdown file, a simple text file that can be at a system level and you can then add it to any folder to give that folder its own specific instructions as well. So, you can either write your own or you could get Claude to help you. So, let's do this. Hi Claude, I'd like to create some global system instructions for you that you read every time you work with me, no matter what folder within this main folder you are working within. Could you suggest what a solid system instruction would be? Now, here's what I would want to put into it. I'd like to include in this a couple of suggestions, who I am, like my job, that I'm a non-tech user, and so I'd like you to always talk to me in non-technical language and explain things as you go, so I never get overwhelmed by technical information. I'm a content creator and theater director. Speak to me in plain English, never jargon. Be direct, don't over-explain. If you can just do the thing, do it. So, share with it also what you need help with. I work with email, Notion, Google Drive, and content creation. My preference is a British spelling, warm but direct tone, challenge me if there's a better way. Let's add some safety rules, never delete, send, or publish anything without first checking with me. And any other recommendations you had for a really solid system instructions. I would also add that I want you to be honest with me. If you think there is a better way of doing things or that I'm risking overcomplicating or going too far down rabbit hole, you should flag it. So, you can just talk to it like this. I'm going to click let's go, let's see what it does. So, it's looking at this workspace and found an empty directory. So, we're going to create a file called claw.md and it lives at the root of your workspace and picks up automatically every session. Great. So, it's explaining everything to me because I've said I want that. That's what you need to do. Make sure you tell it that. Done. Here's Here it is. Don't build a spaceship when a bicycle will do. Great. Clear recommendations for overlong prompt options, scope drift check, no overwriting. Sounds good. Let me view the file and then you can take a look at it here, which is great. So, now if we go to the folder, we can see the Claude file and there it is. Fantastic. Now, one thing I recommend is this. Is it worth me dropping this into the co-work global instructions window in settings for co-work, so it's pervasive across all folders. And here you'll see, yes, absolutely. Should we delete the old version if you're always going to read the one in the global instructions? So, you can have a little back and forth of it. Great. So, what we're going to do is we're going to view the file, select everything in it by clicking copy, go to our instructions, co-work, edit, paste it in, and save it. So, that means Claude always follow those instructions. And of course, remember that you can add secondary Claude.md files in any folder. Or you could set an instruction to say, when I say downloads, clean up my downloads like this. Simple as that. So, now Claude co-work knows your rules, but it doesn't know you yet. So, my step three is to fix that, where co-work becomes a much more effective assistant with personal context, a memory, and a better writing style. These ones are where you suddenly become more advanced than most users. So, step three is to create an about me folder. Take a little look at my current co-work setup. You'll see I have this folder here, which if we click into it, we have a couple of other items in here. Now, we're not going to get into absolutely all of this, cuz some of these are like for another video. And this folder is going to be where you teach co-work who you are and how you want it to act. I have three files in mine. I have about me, which shares who I am and what I do. I have a memory file, which is where Claude will log memory of its conversations. And I have a writing rules file, which is going to inform how it speaks and to avoid that AI writing style. So, to show you how simple this is, let's ask Claude to make them for us while I explain to you and Claude what they should be. It really is that simple. So, we're going to jump back to Claude and say the following. Hey Claude, I'd like you to create an about me folder within your co-work folder, which is going to be the place that holds three key pages that will inform how you act every time we communicate. Once you've created them, I also want you to give me an update to your global instructions to ensure that you always read these three pages every time we start a session. I'm going to keep speaking to it. File one is going to be an about-me.md. That's going to include my name, what I do, what my business is, my tools, that kind of stuff. Let's make a naming convention for all MD files in the similar style to what I've written here. I think the about-me.md could also cover my audience or customers, my current projects, everything a smart new team member would need to know about me on day one. Let's make this and then we'll also make file two, which is going to be writing-rules.md. This is how I like things to be written. And to do this, I'd like you to go and research anti-AI writing style in Wikipedia, find the page on that on Wikipedia, and then use it to create a broken-down description of everything you should avoid when you write to not sound like an AI. Finally, I'd like you to create me a memory. md, which I want you to update to be a system that you write memories to, you append to the bottom of it or update existing entries if it relates to them and is necessary. And this file should be the thing that prevents you from forgetting where we are with projects and what we're doing. You then need to reference all three of these pages for the global instructions to make sure that you know how to use them. Ask me any questions needed, but otherwise go ahead and build those for me. Okay, let's see what Claude does. Now, this memory.md, this one's clever. It's a log where you will record global preferences, decisions, context after each session, so you make sure that your global instructions will remind you to always fill that out. That's going to be really essential for Claude, because it means that it's going to be always updated and clear on where it's at. So, here we go. It's asking me some qualifying questions. Who will your main audience be? I'm going to say it's going to be all of these. Great. And then you can write something else in here. Why don't we do that? So, now it's worth saying that Claude has a little bit of context about me already, right? Because it's already connected into my workspace with connectors, but we'll talk about that a bit later. So, what are your current active projects? I would say all of those. What's your core mission? And let's say that. Oh, actually, it's also to help business owners work with AI and to share intentional tech on the Better Creating channel. I have two channels, Systems Made Better and Better Creating. Better Creating is the tech channel for intentional tech, Apple products, desk setups. Systems Made Better is to help freelancers, solopreneurs, workers, founders, business owners leverage AI and Notion and other systems without being tech experts. I'm just going to add that in. So, you can see it's been working in a few different ways. And something that this system does is it can work with multiple agents at once, which is pretty crazy. So, this is now working through the signs of AI writing. It's dragging out key bits of information. It's building it all out. It's totally mad. Let's go and take a little look and see if anything's turning up. Well, we've got our about me folder and our about me file. We can take a little look at that. And here it is. It's given quite a lot of information. Systems may better better creating core tools, how I think. This is pretty cool, right? It's giving a load of different information and it's also obviously got a bunch of other bits of information I've already given it because I'm I'm trying to demo this, but you might have to tell it a few more things. Now we've got our memory MD and there is session log, the active projects, and key decisions, preferences, append new entries below this. You can see that's all working really beautifully. And we've got our writing rules and it's created a detailed writing rules, band phrases, no superficial in commentary. It's really cool. You can kind of dive into it, but yeah, simple as that. I love that little bit of advice. Very powerful. So, let's go and see what it said. Great. It's done it. 14 rules, system memory, and then we can go check them out. Excellent. Please tell me what I need to adjust in my global instructions and I will paste them in. So, don't forget, if you've put them into that setup, if you don't want to just leave them as you've got it in the folder, you need to go and do this. And look, it's really simple. It just writes the whole thing out. Non-negotiables. Another example of how to keep things solid and safe. And these are at start of every session read these. Should we move the required reading for every session to the top of the entry? Great. Yes, go ahead. It's updating the global instructions. I can now just click in here, copy everything, and then we can just jump back into our settings. There we go. Save. Now, once you've got these set, you don't really need to change them. So, the way to think about it is once those global instructions are solid and directing to these other documents, you won't have to touch them for a long time. There you go. Next time you start a conversation, it reads this file and remembers what happens before. It's like giving Claude Work a notebook it checks every morning. The more specific you are with these files, the better the results. Vague instructions get vague outputs. So, let's start a new task and let's say, "Tell me about how you are meant to work with me." Now, what I should see it do is now read those instructions. Let's watch. Boom. You can tell it's worked because it's dropped in that it's read all of that context. Wow. So, in just a few minutes, you now have a version of Claude Work that knows your rules, knows who you are, and remembers what we've done together. You are now further ahead. But, it gets even better. It's time to talk about [music] customization, skills, and connectors. And let's start with connectors because connecting tools you already use transforms Claude into a whole new level [music] of power. And the first connection is going to surprise you with how much it can do. After that, I'll show you how we can download or create skills [music] and plugins to supercharge Claude Work systems with specialist skills. So, step four, [music] you can access this either through settings or just click customize and click connectors. You'll see here I've already got a bunch of things connected. Notion, Slack, Superbase, and Versel they're connected to create websites. I've got make.com automations I can call upon. I'm using Google Calendar, Google Drive. It's amazing. Tools like Gmail, which we'll set up in a moment, which means that Claude can genuinely manage your emails. It's amazing. But, first, I just want to talk about Claude in Chrome because Claude can browse the web for you. This is one thing that's worth installing straight away if you're comfortable. It's a browser extension that lets Claude work actually browse websites, read pages, pull information, fill in forms, even click through multiple step workflows. Instead of copying and pasting URLs into the chat, you just say, "Go read this page." and it does it. It's amazing. So, in here, click on Claude Chrome and you just enable it. Now, you need to install the Claude in Chrome extension for the Chrome app. But, if you just ask Claude to do that, it will do it. So, actually, why don't we just say, "I'm demoing how to set up Claude in Chrome. Could you model what you would do to help me install it?" Or even just direct me to the link for it in Chrome. So, here you go. This is the kind of thing you could do. Just ask it. We can then click open the link and there you go. You'll get to a page a bit like this and you can just click install. So, it is now up here. I have it and it has a couple of things you need to be aware of. It's a beta feature. It has risks included. So, this is up to you whether you want to try it, but I am finding it's absolutely brilliant and it will search the web for you. So, why don't we do a little demo of this? Could you pull me up a popular Reddit thread on using Claude Chrome, please, in the Claude browser? So, if we now go to Chrome, there you go. Here comes the tab. And for those of you that are worried about permissions, this is really useful to see. You can allow things that's do this time only. And there you go. It navigated for us. This isn't the perfect example, but you can often, when you're building things out, see it do unbelievable things. This is a bunch of views that it's been working in in the past. Do you want to you can just delete a group and it will just shut those down in case you don't need to see them. Yeah, so that's great. So, you'll see that it was it was researching for me uh websites that I I quite like the design of to inspire a website plan. Amazing. So, back in Connectors, we've got that set up. So, if you're comfortable giving it browser access, install it now. 30 seconds and you're done. If not, no worries. Everything else works without it. It's a bonus, not a requirement. But, I have to say it's been very helpful. Right. Now, let's connect your actual apps. I've got all of these already connected. Let's do Gmail. There it is. It's as simple as this. Find the connector. You can search for connectors here. You can click add and browse connectors and there's a bunch of them here. I mean, look at this. Essentially, what I recommend doing is getting on here and anything that you use, click the plus button and add it. It will always ask permission to use it. It is fantastic. It basically is just going to be like what you need. I'm using a huge amount of things in here. I might even connect my PayPal at some point and see what that does. But, that gets a bit scarier, doesn't it? But, yeah, look. Wix are in there. Marketplace There's more here since last time I looked as well. So, the list is growing exponentially. So, let's do the obvious one, Gmail. I'm going to click connect. It says, "Do you want to connect Claude to Gmail?" Continue. I'm going to select my email address. Continue. Now, you can only connect one account these days. Hopefully, multiple accounts will come soon. But, there you go. It is kind of done. And you can just decide within Gmail what permissions you want to give. Now, for other systems such as Notion, there's lots and lots of permissions, right? That you could adjust depending on what you're comfortable with allowing it to do or if you want it to need approval or just it's blocked from doing. It's pretty simple to do. Connect that. I really recommend connecting calendar. That will allow it to search your calendar as well and check what's going on for you in the week and so on and so forth. Create calendar events, all the rest of it. So, why don't we test calendar and Gmail? I'm just testing your connectors. Please, could you check my inbox and my calendar and let me know anything that's important for tomorrow. So, it's now loading tools. You can see them here. You can open them up and see what it's doing if you really want to understand it. You'll see that it has loaded Google Calendar and Gmail. It's listing events and here's the rundown. So, let's just shut this up. Your morning kicks off with a weekly meeting with Lisa. Great. I've got a partnership and then I'm going to the Adobe Create Alive event 1 to 7:30. I've also got to go to Selfridges and return a top. There you go. And then a bunch of emails worth noting from different people speaking at a Notion AI Labs for startups. We've got a check-in with my strategist. Couple of people I'm working with. Look at that. And some brand collabs. >> [laughter] >> I got I made $583 on a paper-like commission. Love it. So, why don't we just say, "Could you draft me a reply to Ben Far based on the conversation? I will likely want to book a meeting with him." So, let's ask him for availability. And because I've said book a meeting, my WhisperFlow has inserted my Calendly link. Really cool. So, let's just see if that works. Now, let's imagine that I was happy with that. You could just send it. But, I'm actually going to say this, "This is great. Please, put it in a draft in the thread ready for me to send. In future, just create the drafts in my email for anything I ask you to do and I'll be able to check them there. You can just share me a list of what it is. Please update your memory or instructions as needed to make sure you do this." And in that way, we can give it feedback to update notes so that it always does these things. So, the safety question everyone asks, should I let AI read my emails? Well, there you go. Two things. First, Cospace creates drafts only. It doesn't send unless you tell it to. Second, your global instructions, if you've created them like I have, already say never send without me checking them. But on that note, if you're feeling a bit more risk-averse while it updates our memory and it's dropped the Gmail draft in, I recommend going into settings, going into privacy, and within this view, making sure that help improve Claude sending sessions to Anthropic AI models, I would turn that off. If you want to be helpful, great, but this is a way to ensure that not many in bits of information are dropped in. And for proof, here we can see Ben's email to me and the draft is ready to go. Now, on connectors, I do want to talk about Notion cuz this is where connectors for me gets super serious. This one is personal because Notion is where I run my entire business. If I jump over to Notion and we take a little look in it, this is where I keep projects, knowledge, meeting notes. I even have down here an agent brain section with specialist knowledge on things like YouTube strategy with a vector database of information on how to do better creation or, for example, an online business knowledge base that helps me with strategy around product marketing and brand development. If you connect it in the same way through the connectors, what happens next is different from email and calendar because Notion holds context, not just messages and meetings. So, in this system, I have everything about my business. So, get that set up and then we're in a very different situation. If I'm going to go back to my chat about the global instructions, can you search my Notion workspace for my agentic business method big knowledge project? It'll be in the projects database. So, Notion uses something called an MCP server. This allows it to query, write, read, do loads of different things. I cannot tell you how powerful having this local connection to it is. Well, it's found it. Okay, so this is cool, right? But it took quite a few attempts to find it. It has now found it and it's going to find information about it. But it's big, it's a detail project page. This is your flag pit product ecosystem in progress. We're going to be building all these things out. Great, these are all my current plans. Very exciting, very exciting. But I would like to now be able to better understand the system. I'd like it to be able to read it more effectively. So if you're a Notion user, I recommend doing something like this. In my about me page, I'm adding a my context map. So what I could do is ask it to search this page by just clicking the copy the link to page, which has all of my databases within it. And then get it to create a context map of my Notion system. Look at that. So I've built that in. So I'm just going to copy the one I've made about me and drop it in. I've just dropped a my context map MD file in your about me folder, which gives a clear breakdown of my Notion workspace for you to more easily find things in the future. Please can you share with me an updated Claude.md file so I can paste it into your global instructions referencing this so it can be updated and always looked at. So there you go, it's found that. It's a sat nav for your entire workspace. Fantastic. It loves it. It's loving its own workspace. I made it with it when it was a previous version. And then of course you would just take that, paste it into your global instructions and you're good to go if you're using that method. Okay, following this, please could you check what tasks I have due this week in my tasks database? Let's now see if it does a bit of a better job. Now you can see the difference now. It immediately found the exact database. Got a load of data back and it's now running commands to give us the results. Now with a context map like this, even if you don't use Notion, make one for whatever files or systems you use and add it to your about me and you will have CoWork connected to wherever you keep your plans, [music] projects, notes, knowledge base. Combined with this about me folder, it understands who you are, how you work, and what you're working on. The other advantage of creating context maps for your connected tools is that it stops Claude burning through so many credits tokens trying to find things. Awesome. So, look at that. It's found my tasks. I've got 41 overdue tasks. I have not cleaned these up, but it might help me triage them. So, uh this is a really brilliant way to clean them up. Would you mind triaging the overdue tasks or updating due dates for the next week or so based on priorities. And you know, if you're using something like Google Docs, Obsidian, the principle works the same. Give CoWork access to where your information lives. So, here is the view. It's cleaning this up at the moment. Getting smaller. Smaller again. I mean, look at this. It's clearing everything up. It's now actually updating its memory because it learned about my project and product information. Very helpful. So, that's connectors. You've now got a configured AI assistant that knows you, connects your tools, and remembers your history. That's the setup most people never get to. But now, what CoWork can actually create? So, step five is to use built-in skills, specialized abilities that allow it to create specific file types. It can specialize in documents, spreadsheets, presentations, PDFs. It makes all [music] of them. Don't think of AI as the tool. Think of it as the colleague using the tools themselves. Then, your entire experience of AI and agentic work will transform. Now, there's loads of ways to create skills. If you go to customize skills and then plus sign, you'll see you can create with Claude, write skill instructions, and upload skills. And there's examples which you can turn on here and then customize to your own needs. For example, canvas design. For example, visual arts, PNG and PDF documents. Quite nice. We can just turn it on and you've got it basically. It'll do it when you ask it to do it. This is worth turning on, the skill creator, cuz it will help you create them. So, for example, why don't we do this? Write me a one-page project brief for the Agentic Business Accelerator I'm planning as a Word document. I'm going to do this in Sonnet to save some credits. You can see it's reading the docx reference file there. It's loading its tools. It needs a bit more information. And what's great is it wants to be precise and clean. And it's using something called ask user question. Little tip, if you build your own skills, which you can just ask it to do using the skill creator skill, you can ask it to add in the ask user question. So, let's call it a course program and a community Oh, it's a live cohort as well. It's those two. Great. Internal, just me. There you go. Clarity and roadmap. So, it's just gone for a couple of questions. Let's see if it builds it. So, here you go. It's writing it, generating a Word document, and then it'll validate and save to the workspace folder. And we should see that turn up shortly. Now, obviously, you don't want to sit here while it does things. Ultimately, once you give it skills which break down steps to larger tasks, you can set it going, leave, and let it do the work. It's absolutely amazing. And there it is. It just turned up. It'll say you can view it. But why don't we just skip to the view. Open this up. And if you like things to look nice, you can always say make it look pretty. But just at that, it has done a very good job of creating me a quick one-page document. Just these ideas of using these tools means that you can go really far, really quick. But it gets a lot better than that. So, let's close that up. Since we have limited it to the Claude co-work demo area, we might want to now create a bit more of a folder system in our co-work system for documents that it creates using those built-in skills. And then I'll show you how to make your own skills. This was great. I noticed that you're just having to drop new items into the workspace folder that you're working in. Let's create a outputs folder, which is where you should put any outputs. And if it's for a new project, create a new project folder within that outputs folder. And I think we should therefore also have a projects folder in the main workspace, which is where you add memory and Claude MD files for specific projects. If you're unsure if I'm starting a new project, ask. Otherwise, you can create a project for new items with the output folder sub folder and the projects sub folder matching. Any questions, let me know. Otherwise, add these to our system. And I think for this task, we'll add it to Opus. Now, the point of this is that you get a much cleaner look. I have my about me section, but I then have Claude outputs, where each output is within a project, and projects, where key projects have their own memory and project brief. This is so powerful because it means that you keep context running through each project. So, this is the thing to think about. I've got plugins and skills and templates here. Don't worry about those. I think today, just focus on a projects folder and an outputs folder. Give your instructions clarity that it should put outputs into here and project working documents into projects. This essentially becomes a second brain folder system for your Claude co-work account. There we go. Let's take a little look at it, and there we go. We've got our outputs and our projects. You'll see in here we've got the Word document it created. It's just put it in there. And here we've got the Claude MD for the business accelerator that it's naturally built. Amazing. Didn't have to say much. And a memory where it remembers what happened. Oh my god. It's so clever. So, yeah, you really can't go wrong. Hopefully by now you're realizing how simple this is. Uh totally blows me away. I love this. Please, could you add an update for our global instructions and make sure they're updated. Oh, you've already done it. It's already done it. Look, there you go. It's way ahead of me. Brilliant. I've got a really cool skill here that I downloaded online, which is called front-end slides. And this will create rich text HTML presentations. But, let me just jump in therefore and show you in my outputs an example of this. So, I created this slide using the skill I downloaded. And it's amazing. All I did was share a Notion script where I talk in another video about my [music] CASA framework and using Notion and Claude as your system for organizing your business with AI. And it created this slide. And I actually use it in that video that I've just recorded. [music] Look at the animations. It's unique. It's beautiful. This is what's possible now. Kind of makes PowerPoint less useful because [music] why don't you just get it to create something from a document? It's absolutely amazing. Well, hopefully that gives you some inspiration about skills. They're like giving Co-work professional software training. [music] It doesn't just write text, it creates properly formatted files that you can use and pass on to colleagues within your system. So, think of built-in skills handling standard simple singular jobs. But, what if we could teach Co-work something no one else has? That's what plugins do. And it's where things get really impressive. So, I'm going to go to customize, personal plugins, add plugin, and browse plugins. And you'll see a bunch of plugins that Anthropic just offer already. This legal plugin is what took a ton of value off a bunch of companies when Claude announced it. Just add it and you've got a legal assistant that can help you do all of this. Triage incoming NDAs, prep for meeting. I mean, it's it's amazing. Just add it and you kind of got it. So, I've got legal here. It'll do these things and I can click it to do certain things. I've got an engineering one which will help me review code and bugs, design systems and services architecture. Like, it's totally amazing. Apollo, if you install that, it it can search for qualified leads for your business. And I've built my own plugin to build plugins. This is the specialist sub-agent builder and this builds custom AI specialist sub-agents with searchable knowledge bases and it turns your expertise into ready-to-install plugins that you can use in your system. This means that you can have something like my YouTube specialist, which is a strategist which I can then feed information, whether that be a Notion database or built into the plugin, and it can help you. So, this is how easy it is to add a plugin to your business. We're going to browse plugins. I quite like the idea of a customer support plugin. I'm going to click install. I'm then going to Where is it? There it is. Manage it and I'm going to click customize in the top right and it just says, "Customize the customer support plugin for me based on my company." Triage and manage customers inquiring about Notion templates, Claude code, plugins, icon packs, and any of the products I sell on bettercreating.com. So, it's now going to read about who I am and what I'm doing and invoke the plugin customizer skill that it has. It's going to find that plugin that we just built or added and then just go and do it. I mean, that's kind of it. If you briefly come back, this is customizing this plugin beyond belief. It's absolutely fantastic. It's just asked me about the questions. I will shortly have a customer support plugin that works for me and I can go and update it continually. Amazing. As a recap then, think of skills as the tools already in Co-worker's toolbox or specific toolbox items that you can add. Plugins are like hiring a specialist who brings their own tools and methods. This marketing strategist, social repurposing agent, and YouTube specialist plugins, they were built with my specialist sub-agent builder. I've packaged it as a tool that can be used to build plugin specialists and you can find it on bettercreating.com. No code required, step-by-step setup. So, if you want to extend Co-worker with your own specialist agent [music] systems with their own knowledge bases, the link's in the description. Tools connected, skills working, plugins installed. There's one more level and [music] it's the one that blows people away. What if Co-worker could do things for you while you were not even there or asleep? Step seven, set up scheduled tasks. I think this is my favorite feature, the one that makes Co-worker feel like it's actually working alongside you. Scheduled tasks run automatically on a timer. Everything you've configured, your instructions, your connectors, your contacts, and they do real work on a schedule. It just means that you set them up and [music] they are triggered. All you need to ensure is that your computer is turned on and has internet connection. So, this is an argument for essentially having this on a permanent desktop [music] computer that you leave on. Here's how it works. Let me just show you a couple that I've created. This took me moments. Weekly briefer, I just set it up to connect to Gmail every Tuesday at 10:00 and you just write instructions. Please search my tasks and projects in Notion, Gmail calendar, and my hello@ email, and share an overview of the week ahead. That's kind of it. Before doing any research, read these files about me. Yeah, use the Notion MCP, blah blah blah. And then it just has a guide of style instructions, how it should report, and it sends me an email, and that's it. Why don't we run it now, and we'll see what we get. And if we go back into scheduled, we've also got a weekday inbox triage. This will triage my inbox a bit like I showed you earlier, and give me a full overview of what there is to deal with. And that goes at 9:30. And we can actually see it ran. So, let's take a little look. It found all of these items, blah blah blah, and it gives you a little update like that. Simple as that. And you have to work out what you want the output to be, where you want it to put it, but I would suggest something like set yourself with an outputs area with weekly briefing reports, and then it will just drop them in as an MD file, and you get your answers dropped in. And if you want it to format it and turn it into a Word doc, you can tell it to do that. A PDF, you can get it as a presentation, whatever you like. Let's create a little example here. We're just going to go to scheduled, new task. Schedule task only while your computer is awake, and you can do this too. When enabled, Claude will prevent your computer from going to sleep. So, if you have a laptop, maybe don't use this. So, yeah, that's all the more reason to own a desktop computer these days. And if you watch this channel, I cover a lot of Apple ecosystem and essential tech. I think it might now be the time for a lot of us to consider a home computer and a laptop. And the home computer is where you set up all of this. Now, since I filmed this video, Claude has shipped endlessly. In fact, they've shipped two amazing new items, which just take scheduled tasks to the next level, Dispatch and Claude computer. So, as you can see now on the bar here, we've got our scheduled task that I was demoing before. If we now click into dispatch, you can see a couple of things are going on here. This allows you to essentially control your Claude desktop from your phone. This is why I'm going all in on a always-on Mac on my desk. So, I'm going to have two Macs, one to travel with and one that stays in the studio. You can get Claude to prevent your computer from going to sleep, meaning that scheduled tasks will continue to run, but you can also allow it to work in your browser. Claude will take actions in Chrome without asking permission, including on websites you haven't approved. So, you need to be okay with that. And then most importantly, you've got computer use. So, if we open the settings on computer use, you can see you can give it permission to work within your computer. You can also deny it from using certain apps. So, you can add a a kind of accessibility list. So, there's quite a lot of granular control, and there's kind of various different things. But, the most important part of this is dispatch. So, that means with the Claude app, we can open Claude up, and if we go into the sidebar, you will see dispatch. And that allows me now to speak to Claude. Please, could you find out what's going on in my calendar today? So, we're going to send that, and now we should see, as you can see here, it is talking to the computer. You now have pretty much a kind of open Claude style assistant on your desktop that you can control when you're out and about, and it will work on your computer and get back to you. And there you go. I've got a quick breakdown of my calendar. We could ask it to go and browse information, do research, or continue with projects using the plugins and skills that we've created. So, just imagine you have one of these running every weekday morning before you finished your coffee, co-workers read your inbox, sorted everything by priority, drafted replies for the ones that need attention. You review it, tweak it as needed, and send. Essentially, a personal assistant you can reach at your office every day from your phone. What used to take 30-40 minutes now takes five. What's the busy work that you do that you could get this system to automate? This could be a really great combination with Notion and a business account with personal agent for working inside Notion and this for automating your tasks across all of your platforms. So, that's the seven steps, but there's a bigger picture >> [music] >> that we need to address before you go. Everything we just set up, the workspace, the instructions, the about me files, the connectors, the skills, the plugins, and the scheduled tasks, that's the foundation and it's more than most people will ever configure. But, if you want to go further, I've built a framework called the CASA method. It's a framework that maps out the entire journey to build an AI-ready digital home, your consolidated agentic systems architecture. And yes, Claude co-work did build this presentation. Most people [music] get inconsistent results from AI, scattered information, no context, generic help up. For everyone that's downloaded my free guide to building out an agentic system for your work and filled out the form, 60% reported overwhelm with their information. The number one issue with context was no clear path and generic output was the thing that many were struggling with. I cover all of this on my second channel, Systems Made Better, so make sure you should hit subscribe below [music] and in the description you can find a link to my free guide for this CASA framework to consolidate, architect, systematize, and activate your AI workspace. And hey, if you're a Notion user, make sure you go and check out Agent OS and Life OS, which give you all of these systems for Notion so you can connect all of the dots. If that was useful, make sure you hit subscribe and don't miss the next one because I'm going to be showing you exactly how to take this so much further. Drop your comments below because I read every single one and I'll see you on the next one.