Claude Cowork sets itself up

Start here

The setup guide is the delay

You have read 3 setup guides for Claude Cowork and you have not opened it. That is the pattern. You assume there is a correct way to set it up that you have to learn first, so you keep reading.

There is no setup to learn. Claude Cowork sets itself up. You type one command, it asks you a handful of questions, and it builds the thing while you answer. You are not configuring anything. You are answering.

This page is the walkthrough: the command, what each question is asking, and what a good answer looks like from someone who runs a business alone.

Claude desktop appMac and Windows10 minutes

The command

1 command, then answer

Open the Claude desktop app and pick Cowork

On the home screen there is a mode picker. Choose Cowork. If you only have Claude in the browser, download the desktop app first, because Cowork lives there.

Type the command and press enter

Copy the line below into the chat box. That is the whole setup. Claude takes it from here.

Answer what it asks

It goes through the questions below one at a time. Short answers are fine. You can change any of them later.

When it pauses, tell it to keep going

It checks in between steps. "Sure, keep going" is a complete answer.

Copy it.

/setup-cowork start

What each question means

And what a good answer looks like

The order can change with updates, but the questions stay the same 5. Read these once and the form takes 10 minutes.

1. Your roleIt offers roles like founder, marketer, sales, operations. Pick the one that matches the hours you spend, not your title. Running a business alone, "founder" or "business owner" fits most people. This answer decides which plugin it suggests next, so it matters a little and not a lot.
2. A pluginA plugin is a bundle of skills matched to your role, so Claude already knows how to do the common jobs for it. Accept the one it suggests. You can add more later under Manage. A good answer is yes to one, not yes to 5.
3. Connect your appsIt asks to connect Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, and Slack. Connect only what you use every day. For most people that is mail and calendar. Slack only if you live in it. Skip anything you would have to look up the password for.
4. A place to workCowork reads files from a folder and saves finished work back into it. Choose "Work in a folder" in the chat bar. Make a new folder called Cowork on your desktop and put only the files for the job in it. Never hand it your whole Documents folder.
5. Your writing voiceCowork offers to learn how you write so it can draft in your voice. For anything you publish under your name, say not now. Let it draft, keep the voice yours. Say yes only for internal notes and summaries nobody outside will read.

The one mistake

People let it clone their writing voice on day one, and 3 weeks later everything they send sounds the same as everyone else running the same tool. Writing is thinking. Let Cowork do the reading, the sorting and the first draft. The final words stay yours.

Before you start

The first 3 tasks to give it

Small, real, and in the folder you just made. These 3 teach you how it behaves before you trust it with anything that matters.

01

Sort the folder

Prove it can see what you gave it.

Copy it.

Read every file in this folder and tell me what is in here in 5 lines. Do not change anything.

02

One small real job

The kind of thing you do by hand every week.

Copy it. Fill in anything in [brackets].

Turn [meeting-notes.txt] into a client summary: what we decided, who does what by when, and open questions. Plain English, under 150 words. Save it as [client-summary.md] in this folder.

03

Save the job

Once the summary is right, 4 words make it a skill you can call by name next week.

Copy it.

Turn this into a skill.

What the 4 words do, and 5 skills worth saving first, is on its own page: Say this after anything you do twice.

Bonus

If you would rather not run the command

You can do the same thing by hand in 2 minutes. Open Settings, then Cowork, then click Edit next to Global instructions. Paste this in and fill in the brackets. Claude reads it at the start of every session.

Copy it. Fill in anything in [brackets].

I am [your name]. I run [what your business does, in one sentence] on my own.
Most weeks I work on [the 3 things you do most].
Always ask before deleting or overwriting a file.
Save finished work back into the folder we are working in, and tell me the file name.
Write in plain English, short sentences, no em dashes, no exclamation marks.
When you are not sure, ask me one question, then continue.
Draft for me, but do not try to write in my voice for anything I will publish. I will do the final pass.

That is the whole setup either way. The tool was never the hard part. Opening it was.