Claude Co-work Starter Pack
Claude Co-work is powerful out of the box — and almost useless until it knows who you are and how you work. This pack is the 30-minute setup that fixes that.
Inside:
- 3 context files that tell Co-work who you are, how you write, and how you work. Write once. Never re-explain yourself again.
- Global instructions with safety rails and sensible defaults. Paste once, applies everywhere.
- 7 universal skills for the workflows every knowledge worker runs weekly:
morning-brief, weekly-report, meeting-prep, meeting-debrief, inbox-triage, research-brief, doc-summarize
- A prompt library of 18 outcome-first prompts you can copy-paste for common jobs
- Scheduled task recipes — ready-to-paste automations for your morning, Monday, and Friday
- Anti-patterns — 10 setup mistakes that make Co-work useless, and how to avoid them
Built for anyone who runs their week through a calendar and an inbox: executive assistants, marketers, operators, founders, analysts. Not role-specific. Not developer-specific.
5-minute setup
- Download this repo — click the green
Code button at the top of this page → Download ZIP. Unzip. Or clone it if you know git.
- Pick or create your Co-work workspace folder. Somewhere simple, like
~/Documents/cowork-workspace.
- Copy three things into your workspace folder:
- The whole
context/ folder
- The
global-instructions.md file
- The
skills/ folder
- Paste
global-instructions.md into Co-work's global settings. Open Claude desktop → Settings → Co-work → Global Instructions. Paste the whole file in. Save.
- Fill in the three context files. Open each one. There's a filled example at the top so you can see what good looks like, and a blank template below. Delete the example, fill the template, save. Ten minutes per file max.
That's the baseline. Now Co-work knows who you are.
30-minute setup (recommended)
The skills and prompts are where this pack earns its keep.
- Verify the skills are active. Open Co-work, point it at your workspace folder, and type
/morning-brief. If the skill runs, you're wired up.
- Skim
prompts/prompt-library.md. Bookmark the three or four prompts that match your most common jobs.
- Pick one scheduled task recipe from
scheduled-tasks/recipes.md. Start with morning-brief — set it to run every weekday at 7am. Come back to your desk tomorrow and see if you like the output. Iterate.
- Read
anti-patterns.md once. It's the "what not to do" list. Takes five minutes and saves you hours.
Role-specific notes
Same pack, different emphasis.
- Executive assistant. Your
about-me.md should name the principal you support, their calendar conventions, and who they prioritize. Your preferences.md should be specific about tone and sign-offs. Lean hard on meeting-prep and inbox-triage.
- Marketer. Your
voice.md is doing the heavy lifting — fill it with your brand voice, not yours personally. Lean on research-brief for competitor scans and doc-summarize for long reports.
- Operations / COO type. Your
preferences.md is where the value is: report formats, decision thresholds, escalation rules. Lean on weekly-report and meeting-debrief.
- Founder / CEO. All three context files matter. Lean on
meeting-debrief for your recurring 1-1s and research-brief for anything you'd normally Google.
- Analyst / researcher. Lean hard on
doc-summarize and research-brief. Your preferences.md should specify source-citation and confidence-level requirements.
Power user: install as a plugin
If you'd rather install via Co-work's plugin system instead of copying files:
/plugin marketplace add thecraighewitt/cowork-starter-pack
/plugin install cowork-starter-pack
The skills will auto-discover. You'll still want to copy context/ and global-instructions.md manually — those are content you edit, not code you install.
A note on what's not in here
I deliberately kept this tight. You will not find:
- 25 role-specific skills that nobody will ever use
- A 70-prompt library that nobody will ever read
- Anything for browser use or computer use — those features aren't ready
- Developer-focused skills for code review, git, etc. — different pack, different audience
Seven skills, each covering a weekly-recurring workflow that works for any job. That's the bet.
About
Made by Craig Hewitt. I build AI systems for founders, CEOs, and the people who run their companies.
If this was useful, the companion video — 10 Claude Co-work Tips Nobody Is Showing You — walks through the thinking behind every piece of this pack.
MIT License.
