In this tutorial Julie Chenell walks through a real‑world use case of Claude’s Cowork Projects tab to prepare a three‑day mastermind event called Digital Insiders. She creates a new local Cowork project, uploads the event agenda (PDF) and RSVP list so the AI knows who’s attending, and sets detailed instructions for the project. Julie selects output formats – Gamma slide decks, Markdown files, and PowerPoint – explaining why each is useful. She demonstrates how the generated outlines and slides are automatically saved into her Obsidian vault (the “second brain”) as MD files, eliminating copy‑paste, and how the Gamma connector lets her edit the AI‑generated slides directly. She also shows a more involved workflow for creating personal introductions for each attendee, using voice notes, matching them to the RSVP list, and exporting a PowerPoint to Google Drive. Throughout, she contrasts Cowork projects (device‑local, fast, ideal for time‑bound tasks) with Chat projects (cloud‑synced, better for ongoing work), and discusses the limitations of Cowork’s local storage. The video serves as a step‑by‑step guide for leveraging Claude’s project features, output integrations, and Obsidian to streamline event preparation.
Chapters
All right, I'm back. Today I wanna show you a real use case for the Cowork Projects tab and why and how you might use that. And I am going to pop over here in Projects. Please be aware that I'm working in Cowork. Cowork is an agent. It's not just a chatbot. If I were in Chat, I would be over here. If I were developing or writing code, I would be in Code. So I am in Cowork. And I'm gonna click over here to projects. Projects are fantastic when you're preparing for something that you're gonna be doing a lot of work in for the next set period of time. I have a mastermind coming up, and so I make several presentations. I have lots of thoughts, notes. I have things that I have to prepare because I'm overseeing and choreographing a 3-day event. Now when I set up this project, it's in co-work, which means it's only on this device. Okay. Co-work is local to your computer environment. It's not in the cloud. That's really important to note. You would go over here and you'd click new project. Now I started from scratch and I named it Digital Insiders and I gave it a whole bunch of instructions because for this particular event, there are some things that it needs to know. I also added some files. I added the RSVP list so that Cowork knows exactly who's coming. I also added the agenda that I had created. It was like a PDF file. And then I chose a project location. This is really important. I'm going to put down in the show notes, I did a 2-hour presentation on how to set up your Claude, Cowork, and Obsidian to kind of create this second brain. So for myself, what I did was I went into my vault, I went into my work life, I went into output, which is my brain and the AI brain, right? Raw is my brain, wiki is the AI brain, output is the merged brain. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go to the show notes here and you can grab that class. Then I went in here, then I went in content, and then I went in Digital Insiders 2026. And you can see there's already a bunch of things that are getting loaded. I had the agenda and then I also had the RSVP. So those are the two files that I put in here so that it would know who's coming and all their details, and it would know the agenda. And then I set the project location. I'm not gonna create a new project, but I'm gonna go over here and I'm gonna show you the instructions. This is all about focusing on the Digital Insiders Mastermind. I need to do all my prep. I have uploaded the agenda. All outputs will be either Gamma or MD files, and I want to explain why I did this. Now, Gamma is a presentation product. It's like a software, and I really like, I really like it because there's a connector with CoWork in Gamma. Now, does Gamma make the most beautiful slides in the world? No, but they are very, very functional. And so CoWork will actually design the slides in Gamma, and then I can just go into Gamma and I can edit them. And it will also create PowerPoint files. It can create files, uh, files in Google Slides. That's a little clunky. And then notice that I said, or it'll be MD files. And that's really important for organization long-term. Those MD files are going to go in that folder that I specified. I also told it that I've uploaded the agenda and I also just gave it a link to to the Google Doc that has the agenda as well. So just some general instructions, and that is all right in here. And you can see I've already done 3 things in this project. I did this actually last week. I was kind of architecting what the presentations— this was a lot of chat. And then you can see here that I— my goal today was to get the rough structure of the day 1 slides done. So you can see here that I did this chat and it produced the What's My One Move, uh, presentation slide. So I'm gonna go through this and show you what, what I did. Okay? So we're gonna start here at the beginning and I am just kind of giving an overview of what I see and what is gonna happen in this presentation. So we kind of talk back and forth a whole bunch. and at this point, um, I'm giving it some context. And then what it did was it created an outline based on all that back and forth. Okay. And right here, this was the outline. Here's what I wanna show you. If I click on this, it shows the outline in this form, right? Which is nice. So I can review it. I can decide, is it what I want? Is it not what I want? I can also hit show in folder, and this is now automatically put as an MD file in my output, right? And why does that matter? Well, that matters for that personal knowledge base, right? So if I go over here to Work Life, I go to output, I go to content, I go to Digital Insiders, and I go here, you can see that this is now in output. So if I ever want to update my wiki and update my second brain, It was already placed in there in this entire conversation, right? So lots of— no need for copy and paste. Okay. So I approved it. I said, okay, I like it. Now push into Gamma. So it pushed it into Gamma. Next. Okay. And so here I can go ahead, I can open it, I can see it in Gamma. Obviously I may want to change some things around, but after we talked through the slide deck, this is a very short, um, facilitated workshop session that I'm doing. It's got all the slides here, so now I can edit them. And so then the very last thing I'm doing is I'm going into my, uh, my actual like Google. Okay. And if I go in here into agenda, now I have linked up my Gamma. So right here, I have that ready to go. And I did that in a pretty quick amount of time. And then I did, this one. Now, this one was way more involved because I'm going to do a personal introduction of every single member that's in the room. And so I started this one by talking into my phone for about 30 minutes all about my members and the things that I know about them and what I want to feature. And then I dropped that in and it was able to pull up the entire RSVP list, match who I was talking about to the RSVP list, and it created a PowerPoint presentation. I thought it would be easier in PowerPoint than Gamma. That's why I did that. And I uploaded that into my Google Drive. Now I'm going to continue doing this. You can see all the outputs are here, and I'm asking it to create outputs in MD files first so that I can actually, you know, grab them. Okay. So here is, this is the MD file for the introductions. And this is the way that this project works. Now, this project probably won't stay in my CoWork forever. Like I said, it is local to this device, so I can't go to my other computer and work on this. So I know for a fact that when I build presentations, I like to be on my laptop. I like to be, you know, out on the porch. I don't like to be at my desk. I'm just more creative. But it's, it's leveraging all the connections that I have. So all the customer, uh, custom connectors that I have, right? So when these connections, it can leverage all of this. It can also leverage all the skills, any skills that I've built or that I've downloaded. If I wanted to build these slides in Canva, I could be doing that. I'm just not a Canva, you know, slide designer. But this is a great example of how you would use projects because it's kind of a set point in time. I don't think of Cowork projects as long-term file storage. I think that that's not super effective. Number one, it's local to the device. And number two, it goes back to the Obsidian, uh, workshop that I did that explains why this actually functions better as a second brain, a local private, you know, secure second brain than using projects. But projects absolutely work well for projects. Now, one last thing I will say is if you are in chat, you may notice that there is a projects tab in chat. This is actually in the cloud. So if you are in chat, no matter what device you're on, it will, it will access these projects. And this functions a lot more like the project folders in ChatGPT, where it's like a general idea of, you know, what's going on in the world. So for example, I oftentimes use my— do my Voxers in here because it's synced across all my devices. It's built into the instructions that if I say the word boxer, this is what you do. And so this is a little bit more organizationally like ChatGPT, but the, the Cowork projects are really fantastic because this was so much faster building these with all of that preloaded context. And then all those outputs are being put and loaded into my Second Brain.
