The first five things you delegate
Cowork is the part of Claude that actually does the work. The hard part isn't using it — it's knowing what to hand it first.
Claude Cowork is the agentic side of Claude Desktop — a task loop that delegates multi-step work, reads files in folders you mark, drives connectors (Slack, M365, Drive), runs plugins and skills, and executes scheduled tasks where your plan exposes them. Availability, OS support, and connector access can vary by plan and rollout; check your account before promising the workflow to a team.
The Anthropic and Skilljar courses show you the loop. They don't tell you what to delegate first, when to babysit the run vs. let it complete, or what to do when an artifact comes back wrong. That's the cold-start problem this module solves.
Below: the five-task starter pack, the watch-vs-trust matrix, a 30-second run-summary skim, and a triage tree for stuck runs. Each section ends with a side note on the Codex and Copilot Workspace equivalent so you don't have to standardize on Claude to use the playbook.
// Anthropic's launch keynote. Watch on YouTube →