Setting up Claude Cowork to work the way you do, from the beginning

You set up Cowork, you go to use it the way you use Claude chat, and you get moving. Worth slowing down for a minute first. There's a handful of settings in the desktop app worth sorting before you hand it any real work, and one of them, once it's done, means Cowork already knows how you work, so you're not re-explaining yourself every time you start a task.

You'll find them in the desktop app under File, then Settings. Same menu you'd expect. A few things in there are worth a closer look.

Dispatch

First one's dispatch. It lets you send a task from your phone and have your computer work on it while you're away from the machine. It's its own thing, your computer doing the job in the background, kicked off from somewhere else, and I'll get into how it's different from chatting to Claude on your phone in another video.

Where Cowork keeps its files

Then there's where Cowork keeps its files. You can point this wherever you want, and there's a reason I point mine at a folder in OneDrive.

Cowork doesn't move your files from one computer to another for you. So if you're working across a desktop and a laptop and you haven't sorted this, your stuff ends up on one machine and not the other. Pointing it at a folder that backs up and syncs, OneDrive, in my case, means the files follow you between machines instead of getting stranded on one.

Global instructions

The last one's global instructions, and this is the one worth understanding properly. Whatever you put in here, Cowork knows it every time you start a new task. It applies across every Cowork session you run.

They sit separately from your chat instructions, your skills, and anything tied to a single task. What belongs here is the standing stuff, the things Cowork should always know about you and how you work. So "go through my emails and write my reports" isn't it.

For me, that's things like keeping it brief. That one's doing a lot of work, it pulls the whole reply back to the point instead of letting it pad out. A bit of dry humour when it suits. My name, my email signature. The bits that are handy to have on hand.

Letting Cowork write the instructions

You can type all that in by hand. Or, handy if you've been using Claude for a while, you can hand the job to Cowork itself. Copy what you've already got, start a new task, and ask it to put together a set of instructions from your personal info and the way you like to work. Then walk away. It'll crunch on it and ding you when it's done and needs your attention.

Mine went a step further and asked me a couple of questions before it finished, which email's my primary one, whether to bring in the memory side of things. Work email, and yes. Then it rounded the whole thing out.

Then give it a tidy

I wouldn't paste what it gives you straight in and leave it, though. Usually with this kind of thing you want a quick tidy, make sure it's landed the way you actually want, because it won't get everything right every time. So back into the edit section, paste it in, and read it over.

Mine came back with the things that matter to me:

1. Display everything in Australian Eastern Standard time
2. What the business does and the kind of work I take on, for context
3. Be brief, get to the point
4. Dry humour with me, and a clean, professional tone the moment anything's heading to a client
5. Australian English spelling, no Americanisms creeping in
6. A rough sense of what the date is, which came out of Claude filing things under 2025 when they belonged in 2026
7. Inform and suggest, rather than just running with it
8. Never send an email or build a draft without me telling it to

Most of it looked right, so I saved it.

Now every time I start a task and type into that box, it already knows all of that, the spelling, the tone, the date, how I like things done, and it works inside it from the first line.