This is a personal case study but I think it can help inspire how to use a tool like Claude Cowork to save time on busywork.
I have been on a newsletter but fell behind on reading it. There were 59 total emails in my inbox from this newsletter and I am certain that I'm not going to read all of them and the 10+ articles in each one. I had another idea.
Goal: Extract every unique blog or news source from these emails and find their RSS feed link.
Like most first tries with any AI tool, I go in with the utmost skepticism. Luckily, this went surprisingly well. Let's start with the stats.
Consider opening up 59 different emails that contain a total of 1,352 unique links. Then, visiting each link, noting down the source and then searching for a public RSS feed. That could take a few days of clicking and mindless transcription.
...but, this is something Cowork can handle.
The process is surprisingly easy.
- I downloaded the 59 emails from Gmail. The best way to do this is send them to yourself and download them.
- Put them in a folder that is accessible to Claude Cowork
- Give Cowork a decent prompt about what to do. "Please parse the emails in this folder and extract each link. For each link, find the blog's RSS feed link and create a spreadsheet document with each unique rss feed.
The agent ran for a few minutes and generated a perfect spreadsheet with the unique sources, the RSS links wherever found and even more that wasn't specified like the blog platform and a short summary.
It's the little things like this that would take days of boring data entry that can now be done in minutes.
I think it's important to keep trying new use cases and using Cowork or similar automations as a first line of defense against busywork.