I’ve been lied to for a long time. For years I’ve heard that technology was going to free me from tedious work. But all I managed was to make the tedious work digital. Before, it was papers. Then, folders full of files nobody knew where to find.
But I was introduced to Doctor Claude Cowork and that lie turned into truth. Cowork isn’t a chat that answers you. It’s something that acts. You point it to a folder, you tell it what you want to achieve, and it works from start to finish. It hands you the finished result, not the explanation of how you could do it yourself.
The funny thing is that the two things that have hooked me most aren’t work-related.
I built myself an app to log my CrossFit WODs. I’d spent years jotting times and weights into a spreadsheet that was chaos. Now I have something made to measure, with my logic. An app of mine, not the one someone decided I needed.
And I built another to organise my guitar sheet music, which lived in folders with names that described nothing. Finding a specific piece was an archaeological expedition.
You know the best part? Even though I know how to program, I didn’t write a single line of code, neither for building it nor for putting it into production. I didn’t have to learn. I just explained what I wanted.
During deployment a few problems came up, but I set up the Chrome extension for it, told it through instructions to solve them and, autonomously, it navigated GitHub to resolve an issue with deprecated components —updating them and recompiling—, all while I got on with other things. No complaints.
And there’s the underlying point, the one that goes beyond my hobbies: at work we spend a brutal amount of hours on things that don’t require our judgement. Copying, organising, formatting, consolidating reports from four different sources. Work that drains energy but doesn’t make us better at what truly matters.
Cowork doesn’t make you smarter. It gives you back hours that you decide how to invest.
I’ll throw the question out, because I’m genuinely interested: what are you spending time on that doesn’t require your judgement? What would you delegate tomorrow if you could?