AI Guides › Step-by-step guides
By Nigel Guy · 6 min read
Most people hear that MCP matters, connect six tools in one sitting, and then never use any of them. Or they stay in plain chat and copy and paste between windows all day, which is the real cost: Claude can only work on what you carry to it, and you carry everything by hand. Both habits feel productive and neither gives you a working setup.
The rule: connect three tools, read-only in spirit, give them one real job with a written output, and only then add a fourth.
Every time you open an email, copy it into Claude, copy the answer back and then check your calendar by eye, you are paying a small tax in time and in mistakes. You forget the attachment, paste the wrong thread or lose the date. A connector removes the carrying, not the thinking. It lets Claude look things up itself, in the same way you would.
MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard for connecting AI applications to outside systems such as files, calendars and databases. Its own documentation compares it to a USB-C port: one standard plug instead of a different cable for every device. In Claude, you will usually meet it under the friendlier name "connectors".
Two consequences matter. First, a connector can read and sometimes change things in the other service, so it deserves the same care as handing someone a login. Second, Claude only gets what your own account is allowed to see. Anthropic's help pages say the system never grants more access than the source system permits; it only narrows it.
In Claude on the web or desktop, go to Customize > Connectors. You can also click the + button at the lower left of a chat (or type /), hover over Connectors, and choose Manage connectors. On Team and Enterprise, Owners manage the organisation list under Organization settings > Connectors, and members connect their own accounts from Customize > Connectors.
Connect these three, in this order, from the directory:
| Order | Connector | What it can do, per Anthropic | Why it comes first |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Gmail | Search and read email in natural language; draft and send with your approval; manage labels and threads. Attachment metadata only, not content | Most of your inbound work lives here |
| 2 | Google Calendar | View, create, update and delete events; find shared availability | Time is the constraint on everything else |
| 3 | Google Drive | Search and retrieve documents; read Sheets, Slides, PDFs and images; save Claude-made files | Where your reference material sits |
For each one, click it, choose to connect, and sign in with Google. Read the permission screen before you approve. If something asks for far more than the job needs, stop and ask why.
Connectors are enabled for individual conversations via + at the lower left, then Connectors. Turn on only the ones the current job needs. Anthropic's advice is to disable tools irrelevant to the task. Fewer tools in play means fewer chances of Claude doing something you did not intend.
Where you are given a per-action choice, prefer approving each write action. Team and Enterprise Owners see the three settings Always allow, Needs approval and Blocked; as an individual, treat any "Allow always" prompt as a decision to make deliberately, not a click to dismiss.
The best first job is read-heavy and ends in a document you can check: a Monday briefing. It touches all three connectors, changes nothing, and you will know within a minute whether it is right.
Fill in the square brackets and paste it into a chat with all three connectors on.
You are my careful chief-of-staff assistant. You can read my Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Drive through connectors. You must not send, create, edit, move or delete anything.
Goal: a one-page briefing for the week of [WEEK_START_DATE] that I can read in three minutes.
Steps:
1. Calendar: list my meetings from [WEEK_START_DATE] to [WEEK_END_DATE], with time, attendees and any clash or back-to-back run of three or more.
2. Gmail: find threads from the last [NUMBER] days that are waiting on my reply, limited to [LABEL_OR_SENDER_OR_TOPIC]. Give sender, one-line summary and how long it has waited.
3. Drive: for each meeting about [PROJECT_OR_CLIENT_NAME], find the most recently edited related document in [FOLDER_NAME_OR_ANY] and give its title and last-edited date.
4. Finish with "Three things I should do first", each tied to something you found above.
Format: three headed sections (Calendar, Replies owed, Documents), then the three-item list. Use a table for the calendar.
Rules: cite the meeting, email or file each line came from. If a connector returns nothing or an error, say so instead of filling the gap. If I have left a placeholder blank or the scope is unclear, ask me before searching. Do not quote more than a line of any email.
Before answering, check that every item has a source and that you have not suggested any action you were not asked for.