Connectors, Skills, and Scheduled Tasks: Making Cowork Do More

Out of the box, Cowork is useful. With connectors, skills, and scheduled tasks, it becomes something you actually depend on. These three features let Claude reach into your other apps, produce consistent specialized output, and do work while you are focused on something else. None of them require any coding knowledge, though the depth you can reach with each one grows quickly if you want it to.

Connectors: Claude in your other apps

A connector gives Claude permission to access an external app or service and, depending on the connector, to act inside it. Reading a Slack thread, finding a file in Google Drive, sending a draft through Gmail, updating a Linear ticket: these are all things a connector makes possible. Without one, Claude only knows what you paste into the conversation.

The current directory lives at claude.ai/connectors and includes integrations with Slack, Google Drive, Gmail, Linear, Microsoft 365, and DocuSign, among others. You add a connector once, authenticate it, and then Claude can draw on it in any Cowork session. You can also revoke access at any time from the same settings panel.

A concrete example: say your team uses Slack and you want a summary of everything that came in overnight across three channels. Without a connector you would copy and paste each thread. With the Slack connector, you describe what you want and Claude pulls it directly, formats it, and flags anything that looks urgent. The connector is doing the retrieval; you are directing what happens with the result.

For a closer look at how connectors relate to the broader Model Context Protocol standard, see What is MCP.

Skills: repeatable, specialized output

A skill is a folder of instructions, scripts, and supporting resources that Claude loads to complete a specific type of task in a consistent way. Think of it as a template with logic attached. Where a plain prompt gives Claude a direction, a skill gives it a method.

There are three types: Anthropic skills (built in, covering things like building Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF files to a set standard), custom skills (ones you or your team create), and partner skills (from third parties). The open standard is published at agentskills.io, which matters if you want to build or adapt your own.

A concrete example: you produce a weekly client report that always follows the same structure, uses specific fonts and color codes, and needs to land as a formatted Word document. Without a skill, you either prompt Claude carefully every time and hope it matches last week’s output, or you do the formatting manually. With a skill, you invoke it once and the document comes out to spec. The skill holds the standard; you supply the content.

Skills are covered in more depth at Claude Cowork Skills.

Scheduled tasks: work that runs on its own

Scheduled tasks let you set up recurring or one-off work that Cowork runs automatically. The available cadences are hourly, daily, weekly, weekdays only, or manual (meaning you trigger it yourself but the task is pre-configured and ready to run). To create one, type /schedule inside a Cowork task or click “Scheduled” in the sidebar. Scheduled tasks require a paid plan.

A concrete example: a daily briefing at 7am that pulls your top-priority Linear tickets, checks for any new emails from key contacts, and produces a short summary you can read with coffee. You set it up once. Each morning it runs and the output is waiting for you.

One thing to understand clearly before you rely on this feature: scheduled tasks only run while your computer is awake and the Claude desktop app is open. If your laptop is asleep or the app is closed at the scheduled time, Cowork skips that run entirely. It does not catch up in the background or queue the missed task for later. When you return and the app is open again, the next scheduled run will happen at its normal time. This is a real constraint if you plan to use scheduling for anything time-sensitive. A 7am briefing works well if you open your laptop at 7:05. It does not work if you close the lid the night before and sleep-mode kicks in at midnight.

This is different from a cloud-based automation tool like Zapier, which runs on servers regardless of what your computer is doing. Cowork runs locally. That is a trade-off worth knowing about upfront.

A note on plugins

Plugins are the fourth way to extend Cowork, and they sit above the other three conceptually. A plugin bundles skills, connectors, and sub-agents into a single installable package. Instead of setting up a Slack connector here and a reporting skill there, a plugin might combine both into one install designed around a specific workflow.

Plugins are available from marketplaces. A “Knowledge Work” marketplace is included in Cowork by default. Installation is straightforward: find the plugin, install it, and the bundled pieces are available in your sessions.

For a fuller walkthrough, see Claude Cowork Plugins.

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The next and final lesson covers the habits that make Cowork work over time: how to maintain context, when to use sessions versus quick tasks, and how to keep your setup from getting cluttered.