Setting Up Your Workspace

This lesson walks through the first 15 minutes of a new Cowork workspace: signing in, picking a role, installing your first plugin, and connecting one tool. By the end, you’ll have a working setup you can use for real work today.

Step 1: Pick your role

When you first open Cowork, you’re asked which role best describes your work. This is not permanent — it just determines which plugins get suggested first. Common roles include:

• Sales
• Marketing
• Product Management
• Design
• Data / Analytics
• Finance
• Founder / Generalist

If none of these fit cleanly, pick the closest one. You can install plugins from any role later.

Step 2: Install your first plugin

Plugins are the fastest way to make Cowork feel useful. Each plugin bundles:

• A set of role-specific skills
• Suggested tool connections
• Pre-configured specialist agents

For your first install, pick something narrow and high-leverage. Don’t install five plugins at once — pick one, get it working end-to-end, then add more.

Step 3: Connect one tool

After installing a plugin, Cowork prompts you to connect related tools. Resist the urge to connect everything. Pick the single tool where your most important work lives — usually one of:

• Slack (team communication)
• Notion or Google Docs (knowledge and writing)
• Gmail or Outlook (email and outreach)
• Your CRM (if you’re in sales)

Connecting a tool is OAuth-based: you click a button, log in to the tool, and approve permissions. The connection is per-user, so your teammates connect their own accounts.

Step 4: Run one skill end-to-end

The point of the first session isn’t to explore everything. It’s to get one full workflow running. Pick a skill from your installed plugin and use it on a real task.

A good first-skill prompt looks like this:

Use the [skill name] skill on [specific real input from my work]. Walk me through what you’re doing as you go, and ask me before taking any action that writes to a connected tool.

Running a skill once on real work is worth more than reading documentation for an hour. You’ll immediately see what plugins, tools, and skills your workflow actually needs.

What’s next

You now have a working Cowork setup with one plugin and one tool connection. In the next lesson, we’ll go deeper into how plugins, skills, and specialist agents work together — and how to know when to reach for which.