Go looking for how to use Claude Cowork and you will find almost nothing written down. That is not because it is complicated. It is because not many people are living in it yet. I run four companies on AI, and this window is open in front of me from the morning until I stop, so I am going to write down the part nobody else seems to be writing: how I actually use it, and how I keep it from eating a whole allowance before lunch.
Cowork is a seat, not a chat window
The difference between chat Claude and Cowork comes down to one thing. In a chat I have to paste the material in. Cowork opens my folders, my mail, my drive and my calendar by itself. So the instruction turns into "look at this folder and sort it out" instead of "here are nine attachments, good luck". That is the whole shift, and it is why I stopped calling it a tool. I gave it a seat. On the company side it comes with the Team premium seat, and on the personal side with Max.
The four steps I actually use
When somebody asks me how to use Claude Cowork, this is the order I answer in.
- One room per company. One folder is one room. Run everything in a single room and it starts pulling the wrong company into the middle of the wrong job.
- Give each room a first file. What this company does, how it should speak, what it must never do. Cowork reads that file before it does anything else. It is the induction pack you hand a new hire, for exactly the same reason.
- Split the big jobs. Inside Cowork you can call another Claude and hand it a slice of the work. The one in front of me makes the judgement calls. The one behind it goes through the hundreds of files.
- Schedule the repeats. Rankings checked at seven in the morning, memory tidied on Monday. Anything with a fixed time and a fixed shape goes on a schedule and runs whether I open the window or not.
Where the tokens leak
Work this way and you will reach the ceiling sooner than you expected. When I went looking for the reason, it was not spread evenly across the day. It sat in three places. The first file that gets read at the start of every single room, once it has quietly grown fat. The habit of asking for a whole document when the answer was four lines inside it. And the seat in front of me doing heavy work with its own hands instead of passing it back. Those three were most of the bill. If you are not sure how close to your limit you run, your own usage screen settles it in about a minute.
Three fixes, and that is the whole list
- Halve the first file. Mine had climbed past 300KB. I moved the old records into a separate file, kept only what is current, and tens of thousands of tokens came off every session. Nothing was lost. It just stopped being carried into every conversation.
- Ask for the part, not the file. "Read this file" becomes "find this one item in this file". Same answer, a fraction of the reading.
- Hand the execution back. The Claude in front of me instructs and checks. Another one does the work. That is less a saving trick than a change in how the work is arranged, and it was by far the largest of the three.
The tool is new. The principle is old: do not give one person everything.
It turns out to be the same as managing people
Put it together and using Cowork is not a new discipline at all. Give it a seat. Give it a manual. Break the large jobs into parts. Put the repeating work on a system instead of on a person. And the token question is the same sentence wearing different clothes, because a bill that big usually means one seat is carrying the whole load. So I will put the first question back to you, the one I had to answer before any of the rest of it mattered. What seat have you actually given it?
