Here’s the System I Built — and the Five Steps to Build Yours.
By Jonathan Mast | Founder, White Beard Strategies
The Week That Changed How I Work
I didn’t work more hours.
I didn’t hire someone new.
I didn’t stumble onto some productivity hack from a TikTok rabbit hole at midnight.
What I did was build a system. A specific kind of system that uses AI in a fundamentally different way than what most entrepreneurs are doing right now. And the result was that I nearly doubled my productive output in a single week.
I know how that sounds. I’d probably roll my eyes too if someone else said it. So let me show you exactly what happened — and exactly how you can replicate it.
The Dirty Secret About How Most of Us Are Using AI
Here’s the thing. You’re probably already using AI. ChatGPT, Gemini, maybe Claude. And it helps. I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t. You draft emails faster. Brainstorming is quicker. You get a decent first pass on a blog post or a social caption in minutes instead of an hour.
But here’s what your actual day looks like with these tools.
You open a new chat. You explain who you are. You explain what your business does. You explain the tone you want. You give it context. You get a response that’s… okay. Not quite right. So you reprompt. Better. You copy it out, paste it somewhere, format it. Then an hour later, you need something else. New chat. Reexplain everything. Again.
Every session starts from zero. The AI has no memory of your standards, your voice, your preferences.
So you become the quality control system. You’re the one catching the inconsistencies, fixing the formatting, making sure the output actually sounds like you. Now multiply that across every task you touch in a day — client deliverables, content, proposals, emails, reports.
Your productivity gains start shrinking. Maybe you’re 20 or 30 percent more efficient. That’s real. That’s not nothing. But a significant chunk of your time is just managing the tool itself.
I’ve been an entrepreneur long enough to know that when the tool is consuming as much energy as it’s creating, something needs to change.
This week, for me, it did.
What “Agentic” Actually Means for Your Business
Let me introduce you to Claude Cowork.
Cowork is a feature in the Claude desktop app from Anthropic, and what makes it different from every other AI assistant I’ve used comes down to one word: agentic.
Agentic means it doesn’t just respond to you. It works for you.
The distinction matters more than it sounds. With a normal AI tool, you type, it replies. You copy the reply somewhere and keep going. With Cowork, you point it to a folder on your computer, give it a task, and it goes to work. It reads your files. It creates new ones. It produces actual deliverables — Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, formatted PDFs — and puts them right there in your folder.
You’re not managing the AI. You’re delegating to it. And the AI is delivering.
When you give Cowork a complex task, it doesn’t tackle it linearly. It breaks the work into subtasks and coordinates them in parallel. So if I say “take this brief and create a blog post, three social media posts, and a video script,” it’s not doing them one at a time. It’s working on all of them simultaneously, maintaining consistency across every piece.
For entrepreneurs who are used to context-switching between a dozen things before lunch, this is a completely different experience.
It also handles long-running tasks without timing out. Anyone who’s ever had ChatGPT lose a thread halfway through a complex project knows exactly how painful that is. Cowork handles extended multi-step work without breaking. And it does all of this locally — your files stay on your computer, running in a secure environment on your PC or Mac.
And the data backs up why this matters:
- Gartner predicts that by 2028, 33% of enterprise software will include agentic AI — up from less than 1% in 2024.
- Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trends Index found 80% of leaders plan to integrate agents into their AI strategy within the next 12 to 18 months.
- Cowork is now available to all paid Claude subscribers on Windows and Mac — so this isn’t some far-off technology. It’s here.
The shift from “AI that generates outputs” to “AI that performs work” is happening right now. The only question is whether you’ll be using it or watching competitors who are.
The Single Biggest Productivity Unlock I’ve Found in Two Years
Cowork is impressive on its own. But here’s where it gets truly powerful — and this is the part that most entrepreneurs haven’t discovered yet.
Custom skill files. SKILL.md files.
Let me explain what these are, because this is where the real leverage lives.
A SKILL.md file is a plain text document written in markdown — basically formatted text — that tells Claude exactly how to perform a specific type of task your way. It includes your standards, your brand voice, your formatting preferences, your quality benchmarks, step-by-step workflows, and examples of what great output looks like.
When you assign Cowork a task that matches a skill, it automatically loads those instructions and follows them. Not approximately. Not pretty close. With a precision that I genuinely haven’t seen before with AI.
Think of Cowork as a highly capable employee. SKILL.md files are the training manual you wrote for them — except this employee follows them without fail, every single time.
Think about what that means for your business. Every entrepreneur I know has systems in their head — the way they want proposals structured, the tone they want in client communications, the standards for their content. And most of us spend enormous energy either doing everything ourselves because nobody else does it right, or constantly reexplaining our standards when we try to delegate.
SKILL.md files externalize those systems. You write your standards down once, and from that point forward, every task Cowork handles adheres to them.
Your proposal skill ensures every proposal follows your exact structure. Your content skill ensures every post matches your voice. Your client communication skill ensures every email maintains the professionalism you’ve built your reputation on.
You go from being the bottleneck in your own business to being the architect of systems that maintain your standards without you hovering over them.
And before you wonder if this requires technical skills — it doesn’t. If you can write clear instructions for a human assistant, you can write a SKILL.md file. And if you struggle with that (hello, fellow ADHD entrepreneurs), Claude can help you create the skill file after you’ve described what you need. I’ve done exactly that, and it’s remarkable.
The Five-Step Framework — Start This Today
Here’s exactly how to build your own system. No coding required.
Step 1: Audit Your Recurring Work
Look at everything you do more than once. Proposals, content creation, reports, client onboarding, email responses, team updates. If you or a team member do it regularly, it’s a candidate for a skill. Write them all down.
Step 2: Document Your Standards
For every recurring task, write down how you want it done — not in prompt language, but in plain English. How should the output look? What tone do you want? What are the non-negotiables? What does excellence look like? Don’t overthink this. Just write it the way you’d explain it to a new hire on their first day.
Step 3: Build Your SKILL.md Files
Take those documented standards and format them. You’ll use a YAML header (just a name and description at the top) and then write your instructions in markdown. Include examples of what success looks like — great proposals, great social posts, great client memos. The more specific and example-rich, the better the output.
Step 4: Schedule What You Can
Which of those tasks happen on a predictable schedule? Daily morning briefings. Weekly report compilations. Recurring content formatting passes. Set them up as recurring tasks in Cowork and let them run automatically. You stop being the person who does every recurring task and become the person who designed the system that handles them.
Step 5: Iterate
Your first skills won’t be perfect. That’s fine — it’s like a new hire on day one. Run them, review the output, tighten things up. Within two or three rounds, you’ll have skills that produce work so close to your personal standard that the difference is almost negligible. In my experience, the difference is often better.
Five steps. No coding. And the compound effect over a week, a month, a quarter? It’s substantial.
The Real Promise Isn’t Efficiency. It’s This.
I want to close with something that matters more to me than any productivity metric.
This week, with this system running, I had more time for deep strategic thinking — about my clients’ problems, about where my business is going, about the things that actually require me. I delivered more consistent work because the skills held my standards even when I was running low on energy or in a rush. I was more present — at work and with my family.
And I had the bandwidth to create content like this, to share what I’m learning with people who are trying to build something that matters.
The promise isn’t to do more stuff. It’s to do more of what matters.
Build the systems that handle the predictable work so you can pour yourself into the creative, the strategic, the deeply human work that only you can do.
The tools are here. Right now. The question is whether you’ll invest the time to build the systems around them.
If you do, I promise you: the results will surprise you.
Jonathan Mast is the Founder of White Beard Strategies, where he helps 500,000+ entrepreneurs use AI to grow their businesses without losing their voice or their mind. He created the Perfect Prompt Framework™ and teaches entrepreneurs how to build AI systems that actually work — in the real world, not just in demos. Find more at jonathanmast.com.
