Last year, if you wanted to schedule a meeting with a coworker, you’d have to
1. check your calendar,
2. then check theirs,
3. then find a time that works,
4. type up the invite,
5. and send it as an email.
Two minutes for something that should take ten seconds.
Now you can simply tell Claude, “find a time that works for me and Sarah this week and send the invite.” Done.
So what’s the difference? Well, AI can now plug directly into the apps you already use. Instead of giving you instructions and saying “good luck”, it reaches into the app and does the work itself. That might sound like magic now, but by the end of this article, you’ll know exactly how to set it up.
In Issue #1, we showed you how to give your AI a name, a memory, and a job. That was about making AI think better. This one is about making AI do actual tasks for you.
How does it work? It’s with a tool that Claude aptly calls “Connectors”. Basically, it’s a bunch of imaginary cables that attach to Claude on one end, and your apps on the other. You may sometimes see it labelled online as MCPs (Model Context Protocol 🤓)
So, what’s already connected?
Gmail and Google Calendar. Tell Claude to draft an email and it’s ready to send. Ask what’s on your calendar tomorrow and it reads your schedule back to you. Tell it to find a time that works for you and two coworkers and it checks everyone’s availability.
Slack. Claude reads channels, searches messages, and sends updates without you opening the app. “What happened in Slack overnight?” Ten-second summary. “Tell the team in #content that the draft is ready for review.” Sent.
Notion. Claude reads and writes to your notes, projects, and databases. I use this to keep my content calendar updated without ever opening Notion.
Google Drive. Claude searches and reads your docs without you hunting through folders. Need that proposal from last month? Ask for it.
beehiiv. This newsletter runs on beehiiv! Their connector lets me pull subscriber data and engagement stats straight into Claude. “Build a database of subject lines from my newsletters and compare the length to its open rate.” Advanced data pulling, and it only took five seconds.
These are the tools I use every day, but connectors exist for most of the apps you probably use too, even if your workflow looks nothing like mine. Some are built right into Cowork. Others you can set up manually. Claude can walk you through either.
If your company runs on Microsoft, there are connectors for Outlook, Teams, and OneDrive.
If you manage projects, Asana, Jira, Linear, and Monday all have them.
If you’re in sales, HubSpot has one.
Designers can connect Figma.
If you run a business and track finances, QuickBooks, Xero, and FreshBooks all have them.
Even if you’re a teacher, Canvas LMS has a connector for managing courses, assignments, and grades.
New connectors pop up every week. If your favorite app doesn’t have one today, it probably will soon!
How to set it up.
Open the Claude desktop app.
Click “Cowork” at the top.
Tell Claude what apps you use daily and ask it to suggest connectors. You click approve on the ones it suggests, and that’s it!
Here’s a prompt to paste into your Claude Cowork:
I want to connect my AI to the tools I use every day so it can do things for me instead of just giving me instructions. But I’m not sure which of my tools have connectors available.
Interview me. Ask me one category at a time, starting with email, then calendar, then messaging, then notes, then file storage, then anything else I use regularly. For each one, check whether a connector exists in Cowork mode. If it does, walk me through connecting it right now before moving to the next one.
You don’t need to know your tool stack in advance. You don’t need to fill in blanks. Just paste that in and answer the questions as they come. Claude figures out the rest.
So what changes?
You stop switching tabs.
You ask Claude to do something and it handles it in the background while you keep working.
You start asking for things you never would have thought to ask before.
“Check my email for anything urgent.”
“What meetings do I have this week that I could skip?”
Yesterday I sent Claude a photo of a handwritten list of me+machine newsletter ideas I had, then asked it to add each of them as individual items to my Notion database. Then, I got it to interview me about how knowledgeable I was on each subject, and then it texted the three strongest ideas to my writing partner, Olina! True story!
One thing AI Still Can’t Do (even if it tries)
All of this works great when the task lives inside a computer. But AI can’t call your insurance company. It can’t sit on hold for forty-five minutes or navigate a phone-tree that was designed in 2006. Some tasks still need a human, and I’ve trained my Claude to identify exactly when that is.
When Claude doesn’t have the right Connector or if I truly need human help, I turn to a tool called Duckbill.
I talk to it just like I talk to Claude, except it’s for really tricky tasks.
Negotiating down my phone bill,
Rescheduling my dentist appointment,
Planning a bunch of house viewings and scheduling an itinerary.
Connectors handle the digital tasks. Duckbill handles the human ones. Between the two, I’ve almost completely stopped doing the boring stuff, and now I only focus on the things that truly matter… like scrolling through Netflix for an extra hour to find the perfect movie.
(Btw, when you sign up they’ll auto-fill a code for one free month—delete it and type the promo code MEMACHINE instead for three months free. Yeah, we negotiated. And it gives us a nice little kickback 😉)
This is Issue #2 of me+machine. Every week: one way to make AI work harder for you. Nothing you need a tech background for.
Name yours. Talk to it like a person. Let it learn you.
devin+gizmo
Your turn: Did you get your Connectors up and running? Hit reply. I read every one.