Claude Cowork Productivity Plugin: Master Your Daily Workflow

What the productivity plugin does

The productivity plugin is one of the original knowledge-work plugins Anthropic open-sourced for Cowork, and it also works in Claude Code. It has three parts:

Everything is plain files on your computer. You can open TASKS.md in any editor, read exactly what Claude has remembered, and correct it by hand.

Who the productivity plugin is for

The productivity plugin suits anyone whose work is spread across many threads: managers juggling several teams, consultants with multiple clients, founders who switch hats every hour, and assistants who coordinate for others. If you often lose track of promises made in meetings or spend the first minutes of every chat re-explaining who people are, the productivity plugin addresses exactly those problems.

It is less useful if your work is a single queue that already lives in one tracker, such as a support agent working tickets. In that case, a role plugin built for the queue will help more, and the productivity plugin can stay in the background for personal follow-ups.

Install and start the plugin

1. In Claude, open Customize → Plugins, find Productivity in Anthropic's marketplace, and click Install. Plugins need a paid Claude plan.
2. Point Cowork at a folder where you want your task list and memory to live, such as a “Work” folder in Documents.
3. Run the start skill by typing /start (in some setups shown with the plugin prefix, /productivity:start).
4. Claude creates TASKS.md, CLAUDE.md, a memory/ folder, and dashboard.html, opens the dashboard in your browser, and asks about your role, team, and current priorities to seed its memory.

In Claude Code you can install the same productivity plugin with:

claude plugin marketplace add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins
claude plugin install productivity@knowledge-work-plugins

New to plugins? Our Cowork plugins directory explains how they install and update.

Managing tasks in plain language

You don't fill in forms. You talk, and the productivity plugin turns it into tasks with context:

I need to review the budget proposal for Sarah by Friday,
draft the Q2 roadmap after syncing with Greg, and follow up
on the API spec from the Platform team.

Claude adds all three to TASKS.md with owners, dependencies, and dates, and the dashboard updates. Later you can ask “what's due this week?”, “move the roadmap to next Tuesday,” or “what am I waiting on from other people?” Claude reads the list, updates it, and can start working on a task directly, for example drafting the roadmap outline from your notes.

Workplace memory: teaching Claude your shorthand

Workplace memory is what makes the productivity plugin feel like a colleague. It stores two kinds of knowledge:

• Working memory in CLAUDE.md: the people you work with most, your active projects, and the acronyms you use every day.
• Deep storage in the memory/ folder: longer notes about accounts, projects, decisions, and background Claude can look up when needed.

Once memory is populated, shorthand resolves instantly. “Ask Todd to do the PSR for Oracle” becomes “Ask Todd Martinez, the finance lead, to prepare the Pipeline Status Report for the Oracle Systems deal.” No clarifying questions, no round trips.

The daily routine: start, update, and a morning sync

The plugin's rhythm is built around a quick update each day:

A comprehensive morning update might flag that the budget review is due tomorrow and still open, and suggest adding a new person who appeared in three email threads to memory. Accept what's useful, dismiss the rest, and you start the day with an accurate list.

To make this automatic, schedule the update each weekday morning with Cowork scheduled tasks, so the dashboard is current before you open your laptop.

Connect your tools

Without connectors you manage tasks and memory by hand, which still works. With them, the productivity plugin finds action items for you. Included connections cover:

• Chat: Slack, for team context and message scanning.
• Email and calendar: Microsoft 365, to discover action items and deadlines. See our Microsoft 365 integration guide.
• Knowledge base: Notion, for reference documents.
• Project trackers: Asana, Linear, Atlassian, monday.com, and ClickUp, for syncing tasks.
• Office suite: Microsoft 365, for documents.

Alternatives exist for each category. Connect tools from Customize → Connectors, and read our connectors guide for setup details.

Workflows worth trying

Weekly planning

On Monday, ask: “Look at my tasks, calendar, and the projects in memory. Propose a plan for the week with no more than three priorities per day.” Adjust it, then let Claude update due dates.

Meeting follow-through

After a meeting, paste your notes and say “add my action items and anything I'm waiting on from others.” The waiting-on list is often where work silently stalls.

Delegation drafts

“Draft a message asking Priya to own the pricing page update, with the context she needs.” Memory supplies who Priya is and what the pricing project covers.

End-of-week review

“What did I finish, what slipped, and what should I drop?” Clearing dead tasks keeps the list honest and the dashboard useful.

How it differs from a to-do app

A to-do app stores what you type. The productivity plugin goes further in three ways. First, it captures items from where they appear: an email that ends with “can you send this by Thursday?” becomes a dated item after an update, without you copying it. Second, it understands context, because the same assistant that holds the list also knows who each person is and what each project means. Third, it can act: Claude can draft the reply, outline the document, or prepare the agenda that an item describes.

The trade-off is that a dedicated app has polished mobile widgets, reminders, and sharing. Many people keep their team tracker for shared work and use the productivity plugin as a personal layer on top, synced through a connector, or an automation tool like Make.com.

Using the productivity plugin on a team

Each person's files are personal by default, which is the right starting point. Teams get more value by standardizing a few things: a shared glossary of product names and acronyms that everyone adds to their working notes, one agreed project tracker to sync with, and a customized version of the productivity plugin published to the organization's marketplace. Admins can then make it available or install it by default for new hires, so onboarding includes a ready-made system for tracking commitments. Our enterprise deployment guide covers private marketplaces.

Pair it with other plugins

The productivity plugin is a foundation that other role plugins build on. A sales rep might use it with the sales plugin, where the daily briefing covers deals and the task list covers everything else; our sales plugin tutorial shows that side. Product managers pair it with the product management plugin for specs and roadmaps, and engineers with the engineering plugin for standups. Personal preferences such as tone and formatting belong in your global instructions; our Customize guide explains how the layers fit together.

Quick fixes

• Files created in the wrong place? Check which folder Cowork was pointed at when you ran start, move the files, and point Cowork at the new location.
• The HTML board won't open? Open the file from the folder directly in your browser.
• Nothing found in email or chat? The connector is probably not signed in, or your admin hasn't enabled it.
• Claude misreads a name or acronym? Correct it once in plain words and ask Claude to save the correction, so the same mistake doesn't repeat.

For app-level problems, see our Cowork troubleshooting guide.

Tips and common mistakes

• Seed memory well on day one. Ten minutes describing your team, projects, and acronyms pays off every day after.
• Review suggested memories. Accept only what's accurate; wrong memories cause confident mistakes later.
• Keep one task list. If you also track work elsewhere, sync it through a connector rather than maintaining two lists.
• Prune weekly. Stale tasks make the dashboard noisy. Let /update flag them and archive ruthlessly.
• Back up the folder. Because everything is files, a synced or backed-up folder protects your task history and memory.

Frequently asked questions