Two upgrades turn Cowork from a tool into a colleague:
- Global instructions. In Settings, Cowork, you can write standing instructions that apply to every task: your role, preferred language, how you like outputs formatted.
- An about-me file. Keep a short about-me.txt in your Cowork folder describing who you are and what good work looks like to you, and tell Claude to read it at the start of tasks.
- Scheduled tasks. Type /schedule in a task to make something recur, like a Monday summary of a folder. Your computer must be on with the app open for scheduled tasks to run.
Practice
Write three lines of global instructions now. Even "Answer in Slovenian. Keep outputs short. Always list assumptions you made" changes every future task.
Done when: global instructions are set and one task has visibly used them.