In this lesson, you'll walk a Cowork task end-to-end through delegation, mid-task steering, and final review. You'll learn to respond to clarifying questions and course-correct when Claude heads in the wrong direction.
You picked a task in previous lessons. Now is when it leaves your plate. Open Cowork, point it at the folder where the context for the task lives, turn on any connectors that hold relevant context for the task, and write your prompt.
A good Cowork prompt does three things:
If you're used to prompting a chatbot, this will feel like more upfront work — it is. The trade is that more of the back-and-forth happens upfront, before Claude starts, instead of across five rounds of "actually, can you also..."
Claude asks questions to clarify any ambiguities about your objectives before it gets into the work. In Chat, you collaborate as you go — context shows up turn by turn. In Cowork, you delegate and it returns with a completed artifact. Anything that might trip it up — any gaps in its understanding — comes up through the questions before it dives in.
Most are easy: Claude presents a couple of options and you click the one that fits. If none of the options fit, you can answer in your own words.
Watch Cowork's plan and progress as it works. If it's going off-track — wrong source, wrong format, wrong tone — interrupt. You can also stop the run if it's substantially off, refine the prompt, and start again with what you've learned. Most people's instinct from Chat is to wait until the response is done and then regenerate. Resist that. Cowork is built for course corrections, and the cost of a redirect is low.
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When Claude is done, you can preview the file in the app. The file is also in your folder, so you can open it up and see it there.
Review it the way you'd read a draft from someone you trust but don't yet fully know — with your discernment turned on. Things to check, especially the first few times:
If the draft is mostly right, tell Claude what to change rather than starting over. Claude remembers the conversation and edits faster than it regenerates.
If the draft is wrong in a load-bearing way, the prompt was missing the load-bearing piece of context. Point Claude to the new context and ask it to make adjustments.
Take the task you identified in Lesson 3 — or pick one now. Hand it to Cowork using the process you just walked through — name the deliverable, the inputs, and any nuance; answer the clarifying questions specifically; steer if it drifts; review the result with your discernment on. The first run is the one that teaches you the most.
You've now done it once. In Module 2, you'll start making Cowork yours — keeping the context that worked, the workflows you want repeated, and the expertise your team relies on, so you don't re-supply it every time you start a task.