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- My guide to Claude Cowork 📖
Hello everybody, welcome back to Moodboard 🌴
Today’s edition is my favorite in a while.
BEFORE WE DIVE IN:
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I'll be honest with you. Up until recently, I wasn't sold on Claude Cowork.
When it launched back in January, I played around with it, thought "cool," and went right back to Claude Chat.
This is mostly due to the fact that so much time had been spent building out my projects in the Claude web UI.
My newsletter project, my client projects, my meta-prompting workflows, everything was organized and compounding inside Claude Chat.
I talked about how cool the new Dispatch feature was last edition, but Cowork still didn't have projects, so there was really no reason for me to switch over… until…
Anthropic launched projects in Cowork, and I fell down a rabbit hole of experimentation, migrating my workflows, reorganizing my desktop, and discovering a setup that makes every task I run smarter than the last.
Today I'm walking you through exactly how I set it up, so you can skip the trial and error.
(ALSO: If you prefer to walk through this whole set-up on a live call with me next week, I’m hosting a free “Claude Cowork 101” workshop on Wednesday, 4/1. You can register for that here 🤝)
Alright, let's dive in 👇
Setting Up Your ‘Projects’ in Cowork
Okay, there are three ways to set up a Cowork project:
Start from scratch: Build a new folder on your desktop, write project instructions, and start populating it with files.
Use an existing folder: Point Cowork at a folder that already lives on your computer. That folder becomes the knowledge hub for that project.
Import from Claude Chat: This is the big one. All of the work you've done building out projects in Claude Chat (the instructions, the knowledge files, the compounded context + memory), you can now bring it into Cowork (via creating a folder directly on your computer) with one click.
That import feature is what sent me down this rabbit hole.
Months of context, transferred instantly and paired with Cowork's agentic features.
Get Organized
Now, as I quickly learned, to get the most out of Cowork you have to organize your files a bit.
This was genuinely (maybe embarrassingly) a mindset shift for me.
My desktop has traditionally been a mess. Everything lived in my Downloads folder with no real system.
Plus, I'd always relied on Claude Chat's project knowledge to hold everything. I'd upload files, let the cloud do the organizing, and leverage Claude’s memory for whenever I needed to find a one-off chat (“Hey Claude, remember when we talked about…”)
When using Cowork, your project folders live directly on your computer.
The files in those folders are your project knowledge. So the organizational work you do upfront compounds over time as Claude reads, references, and builds on those files in every task.
I spent a day or so experimenting with how to structure these folders most efficiently.
Here’s the tentative system I’ve landed on 👇