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Hey Prompt Lover,

Let me tell you about my Tuesday morning.

I woke up, remembered I had a call at 9am that needed a briefing document pulled together from three different files on my laptop. It was 7:15. I was not getting up yet.

Old me would have groaned, dragged myself to the desk, opened everything up, and spent forty-five minutes doing it half-awake.

Instead I picked up my phone, typed out what I needed in about twenty seconds, put the phone face down, and lay there for another twenty minutes doing absolutely nothing.

By the time I sat down with coffee, the document was in my folder.

Done. Formatted. Ready to send.

That is Dispatch. And I've been waiting to write this one for weeks.

You've seen me mention it in the last two issues and my inbox has been one long version of the same message since.

"How do I set this up."

Today is that day.

So let me explain what this actually is before we get into the setup, because the name doesn't really tell you anything.

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Dispatch is a feature inside Claude Cowork that launched on March 17th. The idea is simple but what it means in practice is kind of wild.

Your phone sends the instructions. Your laptop does the work.

Not cloud computing. Not some server somewhere. Your actual laptop, with your actual files, your actual apps, your connectors, everything you've already set up.

When you send Claude a task from your phone, it runs on your computer at home. When it's done, you get a notification on your phone and the finished work is sitting on your desktop waiting for you.

And this is the part that separates it from just opening a normal Claude chat on your phone.

When you message Claude on your phone normally, Claude is limited to what it can do in the cloud.

It can't touch your local files.

It can't open your apps.

It can't access anything sitting on your computer.

With Dispatch, Claude has access to your local files, your installed apps, your connected services, and even your computer itself through Computer Use.

So when you message Claude from your phone asking it to pull data from a spreadsheet on your desktop and turn it into a presentation, it's actually opening those files and doing the work on your machine.

That's the difference. It's not remote chat. It's remote delegation.

Someone who tested this sent Claude a task from their phone while walking to a coffee shop.

By the time they sat down with an Americano, the work was done on their desktop at home.

No SSH tunneling. No terminal commands. No bot tokens.

That's it. That's the whole thing.

Now let's actually set it up because it takes about two minutes and most of those minutes are waiting for things to download.

What you need first.

You need a paid Claude account — Pro at $20 a month or Max at $100.

Free plan doesn't include this.

You need the Claude Desktop app on your computer, Mac or Windows both work.

And you need the Claude mobile app on your phone, iOS or Android both work.

Make sure both apps are updated to the latest version before you start or it might not show up yet.

The setup itself.

Open Claude Desktop on your laptop. Look at the left sidebar. You'll see a tab that says Dispatch. Click it.

Click Get Started.

On the next screen you'll see two toggles worth paying attention to.

One gives Claude access to your local files. The other keeps your computer awake while Dispatch is running.

Turn both on. Given Dispatch is designed to work on your desktop while you're away, your computer needs to stay awake with the Claude Desktop app open.

If you skip this toggle and your laptop goes to sleep mid-task, the whole thing stops. You'll come back to half-finished work and have to start again.

Turn it on.

A QR code will appear on your screen.

Now grab your phone, open the Claude app, find Dispatch in the sidebar, and scan that QR code. Two seconds. Done.

Setup takes under two minutes. No API keys. No configuration files. No OAuth dance. Scan and go.

Once paired you'll see the same conversation on both devices.

Send a message from your phone. It shows up on your laptop.

Claude's response shows up on both. From that point on you're connected.

Now here's what to actually use it for.

The morning briefing. Before you get out of bed, text Claude to check your emails from the last 12 hours, pull anything that needs a reply, check your calendar for the day, and write you a quick summary.

By the time you're at your desk it's sitting there ready. This is the one that changes your mornings.

The document that should have been done yesterday. You have files on your laptop. You need them turned into something — a report, a presentation, a summary.

Text Claude from wherever you are. Walk away. Come back to the finished thing.

One person pointed Dispatch at a Google Drive folder with six research documents and asked for a ten-slide outline. Claude read all six files, identified the key themes, and produced a structured outline with speaker notes. The entire process ran while they were on a fifteen-minute walk.

Cleaning up folders. One person asked Dispatch to sort a cluttered Downloads folder — rename files with consistent conventions, move PDFs to one subfolder, images to another, and delete anything older than ninety days.

It executed the task correctly on the first attempt. Local file work is where this really shines because Claude has direct access to your filesystem without needing to go through any APIs.

The commute task. You're on a train or sitting in a car. You have thirty minutes of dead time and a task that needs doing on your laptop.

Text it to Dispatch. Get off the train. And the work is done.

But I want to be straight with you about a couple of things that don't work perfectly yet.

Your desktop must stay awake and open.

Close the lid, let the machine sleep, lose your internet connection — and Dispatch stops processing. The desktop is the compute engine. The phone is just the remote. If the engine shuts off, nothing happens.

This is the most common mistake people make. They send a task, close their laptop lid, and wonder why nothing happened.

The keep-awake toggle helps but if you close the lid it overrides everything.

Notifications are also not great yet. There's no sound. You open the mobile app and either see a completed result or a still-spinning task.

You're not going to get a loud ping when your work is done. Check back manually.

And it's still a research preview which means it won't always go perfectly. Complex tasks sometimes need a second try. For anything simple though — organizing files, pulling together a document, drafting something from material that's already on your computer — it works well enough right now to genuinely change how you work.

Here's my honest take after using this for a few weeks.

The first time it works properly, something clicks.

Not because it's magic. Because it changes the relationship between you and the work. You're not sitting at a screen waiting for something to process.

You're living your life and the work is getting done somewhere else. You check in when you feel like it.

That shift from sitting at your computer waiting to delegating from anywhere is more significant than it sounds.

It's not perfect.

Some mornings something didn't finish because the laptop went to sleep anyway.

But when it works, which is most of the time now, it's become one of those things I'd genuinely miss if it disappeared.

Try this one task before anything else.

Tonight, before you go to sleep, open Dispatch on your phone and ask Claude to look at your calendar for tomorrow and write you a quick briefing on what you've got coming up.

Leave your laptop open with the Claude Desktop app running.

See what's waiting for you in the morning.

That's your test. That's the one that'll show you whether this changes anything for you.

Reply and tell me what happened.

— Prompt Guy

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