Record It Once: How Claude Took Over My Repetitive Work
I recorded a cumbersome Mailchimp workflow, explained my choices and turned it into a reusable skill. An hour and a half of setup saved me two hours each week.
At 2am I crawled out of the studio with my head in my hands. Just like the early days of ChatGPT, when I was still trying to get to grips with the sheer scale of the magic.
It has happened again. Want in?
Here is how it works. Think of that one thing you do on your computer that you loathe the most. It barely matters which software.
Now open the Claude app, go to Cowork and click the plus. There is something new there: 'Record'. Click it. Then carry out the task you can't stand, explaining as you go what you are doing and why. Claude records the screen, the mouse and your explanations, and turns them into a skill: a capability you can run again in full, whenever you like.
Turning a task into a skill
So how do you turn your tasks into ready-to-use skills?
1. Update the Claude app on your computer.
2. Open a new conversation and switch to Cowork.
3. Click the plus (+) on the prompt bar.
4. Choose "Record a Skill".
5. Carry out the task, or series of tasks, on your computer while Claude records the screen, your keystrokes and mouse, and your spoken explanations.
6. Save it as a skill, test and refine, and it's ready to reuse.
The test: translating my newsletter
I showed it how I translate this very newsletter from Hebrew into English inside Mailchimp, the platform where I edit it. There is a fair amount of manual graft involved: making sure the translation is clean and clear. Adapting and refining some of it. Swapping text across various fields and headings, sizes and formatting. The links to Israeli sites need replacing too, so they point to comparable articles in English. I explained to Claude my taste in English-language news outlets (reputable ones preferred, British ideally). It produced the links, and even screenshotted the headlines and slotted them into the newsletter.
Claude noticed that I translate the sections with the help of a custom GPT I set up in ChatGPT ages ago. What a shame, it wrote to me, I can do that for you. I handed it my preferred English-style settings from that GPT and told it to go for it.
So here's how the work on this newsletter is divided: Ideas are mine. Writing is mine. Research, fact-checking, translation and image generation are AI-assisted, while I go thoroughly through everything and change quite a bit. Inserting content into the UI is automated.
It came out perfectly, to my judgement at least.
I added a few more steps purely out of greed ('email me the newsletter so I can check it'). I put an hour and a half into building the process and won back two particularly maddening hours every week from here on. Then I built a separate skill for assembling this newsletter from the Google Doc I write it in.
More to the point, though: ask yourself which processes you are going to be rid of, record once for your own Claude, turn into a skill, and so long and thank you.
