Agents that do work for you, and don't go off the rails

Set up together

Everyone sets up Claude for work the same way, ticking off nine settings in the order they appear in the app.

• About you and your instructions
• Computer use
• Memory
• Code execution
• Connector permissions
• Skills and plugins
• Trusted folders
• Approval mode
• Phone notifications

Tom's Friday

Tom is an account director at a small design studio. Every Friday he spends two hours writing client updates from emails, a tracker, timesheets and meeting notes. His one-line request to Claude gets a poor result. We fix it together, one step at a time.

1. Give it a brief. Brief it like a new hire: the job, the steps, what finished looks like, and the rules.
2. Make it reusable. A project remembers the instructions, and a skill remembers how to do the job, so it runs from one line.
3. Make it safe. Limit what it can open and what it's allowed to do, and read every skill before you turn it on.
4. Make it check its own work. A second check compares every figure and date with the file it came from.

What else can it do?

A quick tour of other jobs Claude can take on, each one run live.

Your Friday

Now it's your own work. One task, one brief, one skill, and one first run booked for this week.

1. Pick one task that comes round regularly, takes real time, and has a result you can check.
2. Let Claude interview you to write the brief, one question at a time.
3. Turn the brief into a skill, so it runs the same way from one line.
4. Give it a home and decide what it can access, who checks its work, and when it can run on a schedule.
5. Book your first run in your calendar before you leave.