The folder hierarchy that makes everything else work

The single most common mistake new Cowork users make is pointing it at their Documents folder, Desktop, or home directory on day one. That gives Claude access to everything — passwords stored in notes, half-finished projects, archived files you haven't thought about in years. You lose control before you even start.

The fix is simple: build a dedicated folder that you own, that Claude can see, and that contains only what you want it to work with.

The recommended structure

~/ClaudeCowork/
├── CLAUDE.md              ← Global context file
├── projects/
│   ├── your-project/
│   │   ├── CLAUDE.md      ← Project-specific instructions
│   │   ├── context/       ← Reference docs and examples
│   │   ├── raw/           ← Untouched source files
│   │   ├── work/          ← Claude operates here
│   │   └── out/           ← Finished deliverables
├── skills/                ← Custom skills
└── sandbox/               ← Throwaway experiments

Create this now, before you run your first task. It takes five minutes and saves hours of rework.

Why raw/ → work/ → out/ matters

raw/ is your source of truth. Files go in; they never come out modified. If Claude reads a transcript, a CSV, or a contract, it reads it from raw/. It does not touch it.

work/ is where Claude operates — draft files, intermediate outputs, working versions. If something goes wrong mid-task, work/ is where you look to understand what happened.

out/ is where finished deliverables land. Your expense report, your research brief, your polished presentation. When you need to send something or hand it off, you go to out/. You never have to search for the final version.

This three-folder pattern keeps rollback trivial. If a task produces bad output, you delete work/ and out/, and your raw/ files are untouched. Start over with a better prompt.

It also makes task chaining reliable. When you set up a sequence — "read raw/, process in work/, write final to out/" — each step in the chain knows exactly where to look for its inputs.

The context/ folder

Each project folder has a context/ subfolder. This is where you put everything Claude needs to read before starting a task: past examples of output you liked, reference documents, style guides, briefing materials. When you tell Claude "read everything in context/ first, then..." — that instruction works because you've built the library.

The quality of your context/ folder directly determines the quality of Claude's output. Every document you add removes one more thing it has to guess.

Start with sandbox/

Don't run your first real task on real files. Copy 5–10 files from a real work folder into sandbox/ — not the originals, copies — and run your first tasks there. This is how you build trust in the workflow without risking anything.

Once you've seen how Cowork handles your files, once you've verified it respects the raw/ → out/ separation, once you've confirmed the output quality, then you promote real projects into projects/.

The folder hierarchy isn't busywork. It's the scaffolding that makes every other lesson in this course work reliably.