[Non-Engineer's Guide to Claude/ClaudeCode Series] Cowork Utilization 1: How I Automated After-Hours Information Organization with Cowork

Introduction

Hello! I'm Koga from the Hokkaido Sales Department, East Japan Sales Division.
I started using Claude one month ago!

This article is a hands-on report about how I automated the organization of information that piles up outside business hours using Anthropic's Claude desktop app feature "Cowork" as a sales representative.

I Want to Reduce the Time Spent on Morning Task Organization

As a sales representative in charge of the Hokkaido area, I work with many customers daily.

As a sales professional, "approaching the most important customers of the day with certainty." While this seems obvious, making it a daily habit and consistently executing it is surprisingly difficult...

Not missing emails received outside business hours.
And reconsidering the priority of follow-up customers based on that content. These two tasks performed right after starting work were my daily routine.

The Challenge is "Unprocessed Information That Piles Up Outside Business Hours"

Sales days fly by with meetings, calls, and creating proposal materials. Meanwhile, emails and inquiries from customers continue to arrive. Emails received between the end of work and the next morning often contain information that affects priorities, such as "internal approval has been granted," "need an urgent quote," or "reschedule request."

In other words, the follow-up plan established the previous day can change in priority depending on emails received outside business hours. Only by cross-referencing "CRM status" with "emails received overnight" at the start of the workday can I determine how to proceed that day.

However, this verification and reorganization process takes a considerable amount of time, especially when switching between different tools. The criteria for "which customers to prioritize" can also be inconsistent, and things can be easily overlooked. To solve this issue, I tried using the "Cowork" feature of Anthropic's Claude desktop application.

Automating "Information Organization Outside Business Hours" with Cowork

Cowork is a feature that allows you to use Claude as a desktop AI assistant. It can connect to external services (MCP integration) such as CRM and Gmail, and has a scheduling feature that automatically executes tasks at specified times. Using this, I built a system that automatically compiles emails received after work hours until before the start of work, along with a list of customers to follow up with, delivering a report timed with the start of the workday.

Overview of the System I Set Up

Sample Report Image

The automatically generated report at the start of business hours consists of the following two sections.

(※All report content below is fictional sample data)

▼ Follow-up Customer List (Automatically Retrieved from CRM with Priority)

▼ After-Hours Email Summary (External Emails Received Between End of Work and Start of Work)

What Was Particularly Impressive

I was surprised that almost all the setup work could be done in natural language. Just by saying "target only customers from the team in charge in CRM," Claude identified the representatives by searching for their IDs and reflected them in the filter conditions. I didn't write a single line of code.

Extension to VSCode (Claude Code)

Since I regularly use Claude Code in VSCode, I also brought the same "team in charge" context to the VSCode side. By writing representative IDs and team information in ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md, I don't have to explain these details every time in my conversations with Claude on VSCode.

Effects Gained from "Simple Automation" of Tasks

What I realized through this initiative is that AI-powered work improvement is "not just for engineers." With Cowork, sales representatives can give instructions to Claude in their own words and achieve automation tailored to their specific work needs.

Information organization that I used to postpone at the end of the day is now automatically compiled and delivered the next morning.
Just this change alone has clearly improved the time and focus I can dedicate to daytime meetings and proposals.
It's a small system, but I feel the difference adds up significantly over time.

For those in sales who think "I want to use AI but don't know where to start,"
I really recommend trying Cowork.
The first step is much smaller than you might think!