Tour the Cowork Tab: Tasks, Schedules, Skills, and Connectors

In a previous video I talked about how chat answers questions and Cowork finishes work. Today I'm going to open the Cowork tab and show you how to use each piece, just what's here so you know what's possible. In future videos we'll go through each area with examples and how-tos, but I want to give you a good overview of the Cowork tab and the sub-items available to you.Here we have something very similar to a chat, except Cowork is going to create a new task that we're working on together. This could take place inside of a folder. I could point Claude at a folder, and that might be something we do if it needs to find something relevant in the folder and then finish work back there. Maybe drop 50 contacts into a folder and ask for the patterns across all of them, then come back to a finished brief sitting in that same place. Or maybe we need it to rename all the files in that folder.For this example, I'm just going to have it find some non-stop flights from San Antonio to Puerto Rico, leaving on Friday and coming back on Monday. Let's see if it can find them under $500, looking for the two best options. Just like we've seen in another video, it's going to ask me, and yes, I'm going to allow it to go to Kiwi.com. This time I've created a connector to Kiwi.com. It also has a connector to Chrome, so it could look up Google Flights, but it's going to try the Kiwi.com connector first. It's going to sit there and work on finding this flight. Again, if I pointed it at a folder, it would be able to use that as well. All of this happens with contained context inside the Cowork container.It did find an option one, which has a 14-hour layover through Mexico City. It found another one at $413. Bottom line: option one is the call if you want to be back Monday. Option two saves you $18 but costs you Monday night. From here I could chat back and forth. Later we'll talk about how we might turn this into a skill, a repeatable task, or maybe something that automatically checks our calendar and looks for flights for upcoming trips.So this is very similar to working with a chat. But we can also create projects, where we have folders and each folder has its own instructions. We can start from scratch, import one, or use an existing folder. If we start from scratch, we can give it repeatable instructions, add files, and create a folder to put those in.More importantly, we have scheduled tasks: tasks that run on a particular schedule. Some run hourly, and those have a little yield notification letting me know they run during peak hours and may consume higher usage. Some run daily, some at different times, some once a week. These are tasks that run on a schedule, and we'll cover them in future videos.We have live artifacts, which we'll talk about. Dispatch allows you to control Claude on your desktop from your phone, from anywhere.Then we have skills, connectors, and plugins. With connectors, we can connect to our applications: things like Canva, Microsoft, Gmail, HubSpot, Monday.com, different applications we work with. We also have skills. Some of these are skills I've created, and some come with Anthropic and partner skills. Some are ones you can make yourself.Then we have plugins. These are ways to connect to other MCPs or integrations that might not have a direct official connector, so we can still connect to things like Zoom or ZoomInfo, or engineering and productivity workflows. It's very interesting, and we'll have videos going over these. You can also build custom skills, like the ones I've created here using the Skill Creator that comes from Anthropic. Under Customize, you can see the connectors and skills set up in this particular install, and we'll be talking about those as well.So whether it's browser use, reusable and reschedulable tasks, reusable skills, or connecting to apps through plugins or direct connectors, Cowork has several different ways for us to take advantage of computer use with AI. In future videos, we'll dive into each one to make sure we understand how to create workflows where Claude can take time off of our calendar that we never have to take back.