AI strategist Tracy Sheen explains how Claude Cowork can help with an EA’s inbox, notes and the folder nobody opens.
You know the two-hour jobs? The Monday sweep of an inbox that filled up over the weekend. The 40 pages of notes from a two-day offsite that need to be a board paper by Thursday. None of it is hard. It’s just long and it lands on you.
Claude Cowork, from Anthropic, is built for that kind of work. The standard Claude chat window answers questions. Cowork takes a job and works through it, reading your files and handing back a finished document.
It runs on paid Claude plans, on the desktop app, with web and mobile rolling out. Keep the desktop app open when it’s reaching files on your computer.
Start with the inbox
Inbox triage is the job that eats the most headspace.
Connect your work email and ask for a sort, not a summary: Go through everything since Friday. Group it by what needs a decision from my executives, what I can answer myself and what’s noise. Tell me who’s waiting on a reply and how long they’ve been waiting.
What comes back is a list you can work from. Then ask for drafts. It does the reading and the first pass. You keep the judgement about tone, politics and who gets a real answer instead of a holding line.
On a work account your IT administrator must switch the email connector on, so start that conversation early.
And what Claude can do next depends on your platform:
- With Gmail, Claude can now draft, reply to, send and forward emails. But it asks for your approval before each one by default. On Team and Enterprise plans an administrator can switch that prompt off.
- With Microsoft 365 it reads your mail and does nothing else, unless an administrator has separately switched on the tools that let it write.
Either way, my advice to every client is the same. Let it draft. Don’t let it send. And if your IT team can switch off the approval prompt, ask them not to. The last read before anything goes out in an executive’s name should always be a human one.
Go slowly on anything that files. A partner at a rural accounting practice came to me with an inbox 800 messages deep. An AI email tool had made it worse, filing things where they couldn’t be found again. We rebuilt it alongside them, one batch they could undo. Nothing moved until they said go.
Turn the notes into the document
Point it at a folder with your meeting notes, the previous version of the report and whatever half-finished bits exist.
Then describe what you need: A six-page paper in this structure, using last quarter’s format, flagging anything the notes don’t cover.
You get a real Word document or slide deck, not text you have to reformat. Expect to edit it. What it saves is the blank page and the formatting (and that’s where the time goes).
Once a job repeats, put it in a project or on a schedule so it runs without you. That’s the part that compounds.
A line on what stays out:
- Board papers before release
- Personnel matters
- Anything under legal privilege
- Anything commercially sensitive.
Your first move
Start with something that carries no risk, such as the shared drive folder everyone has given up on. Ask it to sort by project and date and tell you what it found. It asks before it deletes anything.
You’ll learn how it thinks in 20 minutes and you’ll have a folder you can find things in, which is more than most pilots deliver.
The tool does the grunt work. The judgement stays yours. That’s the only version worth having.
