How to run Claude Cowork from your phone
Assign Claude a task with Dispatch, walk away.
Hey friends 👋
Welcome to another Signal Pro workflow issue.
We’ve covered Setup, Skills, and Projects in this Cowork series. Each makes Claude more useful at your desk. None of them solves the obvious problem that you have to be at your desk.
Claude Dispatch fixes that. Today I’ll show you:
What Dispatch actually is, and how it differs from using Claude on your phone
A two-minute setup that pairs your phone with your desktop
The first task to run as soon as you’ve paired
Three Dispatch prompts I run every week
Let’s get into it.
What is Dispatch?
Dispatch is a feature in Claude Cowork that lets you have a continuous conversation between your phone and your desktop.
You message Claude from wherever you are. Claude does the work on your computer using your local files, your connectors, your skills, and your scheduled tasks. When the task finishes, the result lands in the same chat on both devices, and you get a push notification on your phone.
It’s like a walkie-talkie to the Cowork session already running on your Mac.
An important distinction to make with Dispatch is that it isn’t like instructing a normal chatbot. It’s more of an asynchronous orchestrator: you send a task to it, your desktop does the work, and you go and do something else whilst it completes.
The result lands when it’s ready, which I’ve found can take anywhere from a few minutes for a quick file read to an hour or more for a multi-step research task.
That shift definitely takes some getting used to. Especially as most of us have trained ourselves to wait for a chat response, refine the prompt, and ask again. Dispatch breaks that loop. So treat it like sending a brief to a colleague rather than asking a chatbot a question.
A few things worth knowing upfront.
It runs on your computer, not in the cloud. Your laptop has to be awake with the Claude Desktop app open. If your computer goes to sleep, Claude stops working. There’s a “keep awake” toggle that keeps it open when you’re away from your desk (I’ll walk you through exactly how to set this up).
It’s one continuous thread. You can’t start a new conversation or manage multiple threads. Everything lives in a single chat, which means Claude remembers context across tasks.
You can run tasks in parallel. Send three or four different requests at once, and Claude will work on them concurrently, as long as they don’t depend on each other.