Connect your email and calendar, safely.

Your assistant needs two things to be useful: a way to see your inbox, and a way to see your calendar. Here's exactly how to set both up, plus three rules worth setting first.

Step 1: Create your private project

1. Go to claude.ai and sign in.
2. Click "Projects" in the left sidebar, then click "+ New Project" in the top right.
3. Give it a name, for example "My Assistant." This is private. Only you can see it.

Step 2: Connect your email and calendar

1. Click your account name or the settings icon, then click "Settings."
2. Click "Connectors."
3. Find Google Workspace (if you use Gmail and Google Calendar) or Microsoft 365 (if you use Outlook). Click "Connect."
4. Sign in to your Google or Microsoft account and approve access when asked.

That's it. This connection works everywhere in Claude, including the project you just created, so you only need to do this once.

If you're on a Claude Team or Enterprise plan and don't see Connectors, ask whoever manages your company's account to turn it on first.

Step 3: Test it

Open your project and ask it this:

What's on my calendar tomorrow?

If it answers correctly, you're connected.

What it can and can't do

Your assistant can read your mail and calendar, and it can draft replies. It cannot send anything. There's no send function. Every email you ask it to write still gets sent by you, manually, the normal way. That's not a setting you have to remember. It's built in.

Three rules, set these now

1. Use your own data. Build this on your own sent email and your own calendar. If your work involves client or customer details, leave those out for now.
2. No passwords, no card numbers. Never paste anything sensitive like that into a chat.
3. Tell it to flag what it doesn't know. You'll add this to your assistant's instructions in a later step. For now, just remember the rule: if it isn't sure about something, it should say so instead of guessing.

Optional: capture your meetings too

A lot of what you know gets decided in meetings and never written down. A meeting recorder like Fireflies can join your calls and transcribe them automatically, so you can feed transcripts to your assistant later in this series. Worth setting up, but not required to continue.

What's next

With your email and calendar connected, the next step is to make your assistant sound like you. Find your voice in your own inbox.