Transcription
If you tell Claude Co-work to create a website for you, it might make something like this. Use a skill though and it can create something like this. That is the power of using skills in Claude Co-work. You get better outputs consistently every time that you use them, but only if you use the right skills.
So, in this video, I'm going to share with you seven Claude Co-works that I use nearly every single day. These help me answer emails, organize ideas, create infographics, and perform detailed research, and I'm also giving them to you completely for free, so you don't even need to recreate them yourself.
The reason you need to be using skills as much as possible is because they solve a major problem with Claude and Claude Co-work. Without them, every time you start chatting with Claude, you're essentially starting over. That leads to lost time and inconsistent results. A skill is a permanent set of instructions that tells Claude exactly how you want a task done, so you never have to repeat your instructions ever again.
To get started with skills, come into the Claw desktop app. Make sure you have co-work selected here on the left. Then click on customize. In here, you'll see skills. If you already have skills added, all them will be listed here. And selecting any of them will show what the skill is on the right.
There are three primary ways that I suggest that you add skills into Claude. The first is by using plugins. Here on the left, you'll see personal plugins. Click on the plus and then click on browse plugins. Plugins are basically a bundle of skills and Anthropic, the creator of Claude, has made some of them available to you for free. These are all great, but some of the ones that I really like come inside the legal plugin. You can see that right here. Opening this up, you can see all the skills that are inside this plugin. The one that I use a lot is called review contract. So, if you want to add this plugin to your own claude account, just click on the top here where it says install and then it's done.
Going back, some of the other ones that I recommend are brand voice. This will scan through all the files in your folders and create an enforcable brand guideline. Another one I love is called Productivity. And this one creates for you a task management system.
Once you have all the plugins installed that you want to use, you can test them out. Come back out of customize by clicking on the back arrow on the top left. Then click on new task. And to invoke a skill, all you have to do is press forward slash and type in the name of the skill. In this case, it's called contract. So you can see the contract skill right there. That is now loaded in. And so if I now attach a contract to this, all I have to do is click on let's go and it will get to work reviewing that contract. I don't have to tell it to go in and review that contract. It knows what to do. But if you want to, you can just say review this contract and it'll be smart enough to know to load that skill.
And like I said, there are three different ways that I suggest you add skills into Claude. Besides using plugins, you can also come to any new task, tell it that you're looking to create a skill and describe what that skill is, and it will create the task for you. Or the easiest method is to come into customize here on the left. Click on skills, click on the plus icon, hover over create skill, and then click on upload a skill. And then you can have your friends give skills to you that you can then upload into your own cla account.
In fact, that website I showed you at the start of the video contains all the skills that I'm going to cover in this video. So, you can navigate to this, download any of the skills that you like, and then just drag them in here and then those will be available in your Claude account. But first, let me go over what the skills are and how they work so you know how to use them.
So, the first skill I have for you is my landing page generator skill. That's actually the skill I use to create this page that I've linked for you down below. So to find this one, it's right here. It's landing page generator. Click on download the markdown file. Then coming back over to Claude, you can drag it in here. And now you'll see the skill is loaded in. And to activate this is so easy. So come over to any folder on your computer that has the information in it that you want to turn into a landing page. So here I'll select the folder that contains all of my skills. Then I will activate that landing page skill and click on let's go. And that's all you have to do. It will know that it's going to pull in the information from that folder to create that landing page. But if you want, you can be more specific. So I can say create a landing page for me that contains all of these skills so I can share them with my audience. And because I use the word landing page in here, it will know to use that skill.
The next skill I want to introduce to you is called take a step back. Have you ever found yourself in the middle of a conversation with any AI chat and all of a sudden you realize that you are way deep in the weeds and maybe there's something here that you're missing. For instance, here I started chatting with Claude and I started trying to come up with an idea for an AI app that I could create. After a lot of back and forth, we really started to get into the weeds. And now I'm suddenly wondering, have we gone too far? Are we not seeing something? We've assumed that this is a good idea and we started down that road, but maybe we're wrong.
So to combat that, if I start to feel that way, I use this skill called take a step back. This forces Claude to reflect on what we've covered and to look at the broader picture to see from different angles and to really analyze whether what we're looking at is a good idea or not. So here it is methodically going through the conversation that we've already had, what the original goal was and where we ended up. And it's looking at it more objectively. It's not just giving me the answer that I like anymore. it's taking on a role where it's being a lot more critical of the conversation and the ideas that I've generated and that we have generated during this conversation. So, anytime you find yourself deep in the weeds with Claude Co-work, don't be afraid to take a moment to take a step back to clear some of that mental bandwidth.
Now, speaking of mental bandwidth, another great way to clear some of that up is with a good brain dump. This is when you throw at an AI a ton of different ideas, all that stuff that's kind of swimming around in your head and you let it process all that information for you. So, I created a brain dump skill for you. All you have to do is invoke the skill and start brain dumping. To do that, I'm going to use Whisper Flow, which is an AI dictation tool, because I find that it's a lot better to talk during my brain dumps than to type because I can just have fluid, uncensored thoughts kind of just coming out of my mouth. So, for instance, I'm thinking about coming up with an idea for an AI app. I really want it to be for consumers and I think want something that could help my audience. Those are like people who aren'tical. So there's my brain dump and then sending it along.
It will first read through everything it has access to because what it's trying to do is connect the ideas inside this brain dump with the existing knowledge base. So it's not working in a vacuum. in this case is probably looking to see if there's any ideas from these other folders and the files in those folders that it may be able to use to help me come up with ideas for different apps that I'm working on. And then here it produces a structured output, the same structure every single time. It starts with the project section. So it basically groups all the ideas in the brain dump into different projects. You can see those here. And then it creates tasks, things that I should be doing based on that brain dump. And then here's where it connects the dots between what I've already done and what it can already see that I've done inside my filing system with what was inside that brain dump. So it's saying, "Hey, this might be relevant for you. You've already built a memory system. You've built a morning report system. You may be able to build from that and create something that's a paid AI app." And then finally, there is a how I can help section where the AI will say, what can I do for you now? Do you want me to do a research out, go out and do some research for you? Do you want me to audit your existing memory system to see if that's something that we could build out into a polished product? So, these are all suggestions on how the AI can now make your life easier based on that brain dump.
The next set of skills I want to show you are skills that unlock for you scientific research. You see, the research that Claude is capable of producing is only as good as the sources that it uses. And unfortunately, when it comes to scientific research, it's not the most discerning in terms of which sources to use. It's often relying on general internet content, which can be incomplete, biased, or just wrong.
So, recently I found out about this tool called Consensus. This is an AI search engine for scientific research. You can search in natural language and then it uses its AI models to search scientific literature to provide you with the response. Everything is peer-reviewed research. So instead of guessing, it can ground answers in actual studies and published evidence. Now, I have partnered with them on this video because in addition to being able to use the AI chat directly on their website, they also have an MCP and skills that you can run directly in Claude Co-work.
To set this up, you can come into Claude Co-work, click on the left where it says customize, then click on connectors, and we will click on the plus icon and browse connectors. Now, we will search for consensus. As you see here, it is an official MCP. So, we can click on plus, and that will then bring you over to the consensus website. If you haven't created an account, you can do that right now. And then click on connect. Returning back over to Claude Co-work, you can see here that we have that connector. And I will select always allow so that it can do this research whenever it wants to. It doesn't have to ask me for permission.
Now, once the connection is set up, you can add the skills. So, I'll have a link in the description down below where you can sign up for consensus and also a link to this page where you can download these free skills that they've made available. The first one is curriculum development. The second one is literature review helper and the third one is grant research and use use these skills the same way I showed you before. Download them and then upload them to the skills area. Or you can just run the connector inside of any chat. So, I'm going to ask it the same question again. Are coal plunges good for you? Do they actually help with recovery? But this time, I'll also tell it to check consensus. And so now these results are much more grounded in scientific research because it pulled all of this information from consensus directly. You can see here it pulled information from 40 peer-reviewed papers, including multiple metaanalysis and systematic reviews. It then gives me a short answer that says coal plunges for recovery. They do help, but there are some important caveats. Then it goes through what the science strongly suggests, the optimal protocol, and the big caveat. And down here, it has links to all of the sources that were used for this analysis. So, no longer is it just pulling random information from the web. It is using real scientific peer-reviewed articles. If you want to try Consensus out for yourself, I'll have a link for it in the description down below. And thank you Consensus for sponsoring this video.
The next skill I have for you is my email inbox triage skill. This goes into my Gmail account three times a day and drafts replies for all the emails that are currently in there and also creates a draft in here that's really more of a report for me. You can see a sample of what that looks like right here. Every time that I open this up, I can see right at the top a snapshot of what's inside my inbox, all the most important details, and this breakdown of how all these emails should be processed. So, I get a lot of brand deals, and this says there's two that it recommends I take, six I pass on, five that are flagged for my attention, and it drafted 13 emails for me. Underneath that, it creates an action to-do list for me, everything I need to go through. And then, like I said before, it also actually drafts the emails. And I can come in here, make any changes, and then click on send.
So, what I've done is I've created two different skills for you. The first one is right here. It's called email setup. This is the one you're only going to run once to actually set up this system. And then after that, every time you want to run it, you want to run the email triage skill. So, back in Claude Co-work, I've already uploaded the email setup skill. So, to activate this, again, forward slash, type in email, and here's email setup. Then, you want to point it to a folder where this system is going to live. When it first runs, it's going to ask you a lot of questions about how you like to handle your emails. It's also going to scan your email inbox to get an idea of how you use email and your tone of voice. But all of that is stored as a file system inside a folder. So I created a new folder called email setup where all of that is going to live. Sending that along, it's going to know what to do. It's going to start to ask you those questions. And once you're finished with this setup process, all those files will be created. And then every time you run the triage skill, it will update those files and create the drafts for you. And because all of this is based on information that you've given it and information that is pulled from your actual email account, all the responses that it drafts for you are going to be incredibly helpful and will actually sound like they're coming from you.
The next skill I have for you is called last 30 days. This was originally created by someone named Matt Van Horn. I'll have his official GitHub for this in the description down below, but I've made my own version of this. The way that this works is it will run a search for any topic that you give it across Reddit X, YouTube, Poly Market, the web over the last 30 days to see what that person or that company has been up to for the past month. To set up the official one requires some paid services and additional setup. So, I've made my own version of it that doesn't require any other setup. So, running this inside of Claude Co-work, let me just activate last 30-day skill and then I'll type in my name so I can see what I have been up to for the past month. Sending that along, it will then search all those sources and give you a comprehensive report on what that person has been doing. This is really helpful if you have meetings with clients or businesses or you're at a conference and you quickly want to get caught up on what the person has been up to.
The last skill I have for you is my Notebook LM skill. This bridges the gap between Claude and Notebook LM. Using this, you can add sources into any notebook and notebook LM. You can generate any artifacts inside of Studio. You can even have Claude chat with the notebook and then pull the information from the notebook back into Claude. I'm not going to spend too much time on this skill in this video because I actually made an entire video about it. You can check that out right here in the card up above.
So, I did lie to you guys. That was a bit more than seven skills, but I didn't want to hold out on you guys. And maybe YouTube analytics tells me that the number seven performs better than the number 10. But yeah, however many skills there are, you can find all of them at the link in the description down below. Then if you want to check out the video I mentioned about how to use Notebook LM with Claude, you can find that right here. There's a couple of different ways you can connect the two of them together. The most popular method requires you to use Claude code, which I didn't want you guys to have to mess around with. So, I found a way to set it up using Claude Co-work. If you want to find out how I did that, click on this video and I'll see you over there in just one second. Bye for now.