What I actually do with Claude Cowork

I've been trying out Claude Cowork over the past month to automate certain tasks, and it's genuinely changed how I supervise projects and stay on top of everything happening at MarsBased.

Cowork is one of those tools I knew existed but had never quite figured out what to do with. Between Claude's chat for asking questions and running things like assisted writing or data analysis, and Claude Code for anything that needed tools or working on code repositories, I felt like I already had more than enough to cover all my AI-related work.

But my engineer's curiosity got the better of me and I forced myself to find a use for Cowork. After reading a few articles, a lot of them from the excellent newsletter by the Every team, I started building periodic briefings to stay better informed about what's going on in the company and which things actually need my attention.

I began with a couple of briefings, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, that pulled together everything happening on Slack across the project channels, both the ones shared with clients and the internal ones, and generated a markdown report I could check twice a day. After tweaking how they worked, the way I wanted them to handle links, the level of context I wanted on each item, they've become so useful that I now have all my Slack notifications turned off except for DMs and explicit mentions.

After that first win I built another one to brief me on all the reports we send clients with project progress, deviations, and so on. That's work I used to do by hand and it ate up a fair amount of my time. Now I stay on top of the projects and, more importantly, I have a clear sense of which things are most relevant. This runs off connecting Claude to MarsBased's Google Drive at the organization level.

The last two additions: every Monday morning I get a table showing which MarsBased people I've gone the longest without a one-on-one with, plus a summary of what we talked about last time, so I can schedule the next ones proactively instead of reactively. And I've started analyzing all the meeting notes, internal and external, across MarsBased projects. Combined with the client-reports briefing, that gives me a really accurate picture of where each project stands, so I can decide when I need to step in and when I just need to know what's going on.

Using these tools isn't about copying what worked for someone else. It's about staying alert to the moment you notice you're doing something genuinely repetitive that you'd rather not do, and reaching for AI to automate it. Not just to do it faster, but to do it more consistently. The mental load of constantly keeping an eye on reports, Slack messages, and everything going out to clients is nothing like getting a daily or weekly summary handed to you, already digested and with the right links, so that whenever you want more context you can go straight to the source.