Dan Martell: 16 hands-on Claude tips — Connectors, Cowork taking over your computer, scheduled tasks, Claude Code, Skills, Design — turning Claude from a 'fancy search box' into a productivity engine
▶ Watch original📌 Key Takeaways
- Connectors are the core: hook Gmail, Google Calendar, Slack, Notion, GitHub, and Google Drive into Claude — let it search/summarize/draft emails, schedule and find open slots, even 'analyze my calendar and emails against my quarterly/annual goals to see whether I'm spending time in the right places,' instantly becoming a business coach.
- Pick the right model: Haiku (fastest and cheapest, good for summarizing piles of data) / Sonnet (everyday, e.g. writing emails, giving multiple versions) / Opus (complex, e.g. finding patterns and metrics, thinking more deeply) / Adaptive thinking (auto-selects, convenient but with less control).
- Produce things directly in the conversation: Artifacts (interactive mini-apps inside chat, e.g. an editable sales table), Interactive visuals (clickable, expandable visual explanations), Projects (context-loaded project folders + multi-person collaboration, system prompt ≈ the old custom GPT), Voice mode (dictation is 3x faster than typing, auto-transcribed).
- Let Claude do the work for you: Chrome extension (auto-grab data / click buttons / find insights in the browser), Cowork (takes over your computer to execute step by step, e.g. 'pull last month's sales from HubSpot → put it in a Google Sheet → generate a chart → send to Slack by Monday'), Schedule Task (type /schedule to set a timer, e.g. read emails and produce a digest every morning), Dispatch (scan a QR code with your phone to remotely trigger Cowork on your computer while you're out).
- Coding and remote: Claude Code (program in plain English, so even non-technical people can build a CEO dashboard), Claude Channels (drive Claude Code remotely via iMessage/Telegram/Discord, needs an API key + skills; as long as your computer is on you can build/change things anytime).
- Skills and design: Claude Skills (solidify repetitive tasks into reusable skills, with thousands of ready-made ones on GitHub, e.g. Humanizer to strip the AI flavor); Claude Design (claude.ai/design for making slide decks / one-pagers / landing pages / apps / motion graphics, able to apply your brand style, already partnering with Adobe and set to 'shake up the entire design industry').
📝 Full Breakdown
This is a hands-on tutorial from entrepreneur Dan Martell (Martell Ventures, author of 'Buy Back Your Time'), themed 'don't use Claude as a fancy search box — that's like buying a Ferrari and only driving it 10 km.' He rattles off 16 time-saving, productivity-boosting ways to use Claude.
The first few tips lean toward 'integration and setup': ① Memory migration — in settings, import everything ChatGPT knows about you into Claude in one go; ② The model selector — Haiku is fastest and cheapest (summarizing massive data), Sonnet suits everyday tasks (writing emails), Opus suits complex analysis (finding patterns/metrics), or use adaptive thinking to auto-select; ③④ Gmail and Google Calendar connectors (plus Slack/Notion/GitHub/Google Drive, etc.), letting Claude directly search emails, draft replies, schedule meetings, and find open slots; the advanced play is to feed it your quarterly/annual goals and have it analyze your calendar and emails to act as a 'business coach'; he also shares a 'cheat code': give an assistant a shared Claude account connected to your inbox so the assistant can look up information themselves.
The middle tips let Claude produce results directly in the conversation: ⑤ Artifacts (interactive mini-apps in chat, e.g. an editable sales table), ⑥ Interactive visuals (clickable visualizations for 'accelerated learning'), ⑦ Projects (context-preloaded project folders with multi-person collaboration; drop internal docs/PDFs/transcripts into the knowledge area, system prompt ≈ the old custom GPT), ⑧ Voice mode (dictation is 3x faster, auto-transcribed).
The second half is the advanced/geeky 'let Claude do the work for you' plays: ⑨ Chrome extension (auto-grab data, click buttons, find insights in the browser), ⑩ Cowork (install the desktop app + turn on computer use; Claude takes over your computer to execute step by step, e.g. pull data from HubSpot → Google Sheet → chart → send to Slack), ⑪ Schedule Task (/schedule for timed tasks, e.g. auto-read emails and produce a digest every morning), ⑫ Dispatch (scan a QR code with your phone to remotely trigger Cowork on your computer even while you're out), ⑬ Claude Code (natural-language programming; he gives the example of a 60-year-old CEO, Todd, who holed up for three days and used it to build a CEO dashboard), ⑭ Claude Channels (drive Claude Code remotely via iMessage/Telegram/Discord, needs an API key and skills), ⑮ Claude Skills (solidify repetitive tasks into reusable skills, with thousands of ready-made ones on GitHub, e.g. the AI-flavor-stripping Humanizer), ⑯ Claude Design (claude.ai/design for slide decks/landing pages/apps/motion graphics, applying brand styles, already partnering with Adobe).
He weaves in promotion of his own 'AI company OS playbook' and his digital-avatar platform Apex, and closes with one line: you don't have to use them all, just knowing they exist is enough; if you act on even one of them you're already ahead of 99% of people; 'this is the worst AI will ever be — six months or a year from now it'll only be better,' and professions like designers should learn to use it as soon as possible.
(Note: this is a Claude tips/productivity tutorial, different from the other 'investment/supply-chain views' content in this section, and it carries some personal-product promotion; it's included to help understand the current boundaries of Claude's product capabilities.)