Anthropic shares its good practices for getting started well with Claude Cowork

Anthropic Head of Growth Marketing Austin Lau shares a five-criterion framework to optimize workflows and automate tedious tasks using Claude Cowork.

Austin Lau, Head of Growth Marketing at Anthropic, has authored a practical guide to distinguish between what falls under chat, Claude Cowork, or Claude Code. The three environments are based on the same models but serve different purposes: chat for questions, brainstorming, and quick checks; Claude Cowork for deliverables, in other words, anything that produces a file, draws on multiple sources, or involves multiple steps; Claude Code for software development.

The author proposes a five-criterion framework to identify tasks to delegate: multiple inputs, a file output, recurrence, a result with a known expected format, and a tedious intermediate step. He illustrates with his own routines: a daily briefing generated every morning from Slack and Gmail, a budget tracking dashboard connected to Google Ads and Meta Ads, and a weekly SEO report drawn from Google Search Console, whose production time has decreased from thirty to five minutes.

Regarding methodology, he recommends providing maximum context (files, folders, connectors), describing the expected outcome rather than the steps, and asking Claude to pose clarifying questions before proceeding. According to him, 90% of his work is now handled by Claude Cowork.