How to approve Claude Cowork tasks from your phone

To approve Claude Cowork tasks from your phone, connect Pushary as a custom connector (one pasted link, works on every paid Claude plan), then add standing instructions so Cowork asks before risky steps and notifies you when tasks finish. Questions arrive as push notifications, you answer yes or no from the lock screen, and the answer flows back into the running session.

Step 1: get your connector link

Sign in at pushary.com and open Settings, Connections. In the Claude section, click Get connector link. The link is a dedicated, revocable key that can only send notifications and ask questions. It is not your full API key, and you can rotate or revoke it any time.

Step 2: paste it into Claude

In Claude, open Settings, then Connectors, then Add custom connector. Leave the OAuth fields empty, paste the link into the server URL field, name it Pushary, and add it.

Custom connectors are configured at the account level and work across claude.ai, Claude Desktop, Cowork, and the mobile apps. Inside a Cowork session, open Customize, then Connectors, and turn Pushary on. The Pushary dashboard flips to Connected on the first handshake.

Step 3: add the standing instructions

This is the step people skip, and it is the one that makes the loop proactive. Cowork only calls a connector when something tells it to. The Connections page has a ready-made block, Make Cowork reach out proactively; copy it into Claude Settings, then Cowork, under standing instructions.

With it in place, every Cowork session will:

• ask you (type confirm, select, or input) before deleting or overwriting files, spending money, or sending anything external,
• send a notification with a short summary when a task finishes or fails,
• identify itself as Claude Cowork - <task name> so your fleet view groups sessions correctly.

Step 4: answer from the lock screen

When Cowork hits a decision point, your phone buzzes. The notification links to a signed decision page: tap yes or no, pick an option, or type a short answer. The response is published back to the waiting session within a second and the task continues.

Two details worth knowing:

• Questions stay open for ten minutes. If you miss the buzz, the question waits in your pending inbox and the session keeps polling for the answer.
• Long unattended tasks use an async pattern. For a task that might run while you sleep, the standing instructions steer Cowork toward a notification with an embedded question instead of a blocking wait, so you answer whenever you pick up the phone. The overnight guide covers the same idea for CLI agents.

What this does and does not do

Honesty section. Cowork exposes no hooks, so this is a cooperative integration: Claude decides when to ask, guided by your standing instructions. It is not an enforced gate, and nobody can build one for Cowork today. If you want approvals that physically block a command until you answer, that exists for Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Cursor, and Hermes via npx @pushary/agent-hooks setup.

Also worth knowing: Anthropic has its own notification loop for Cowork through the Claude mobile app, rolling out across plans as of mid-2026. If Cowork is your only agent, it may be enough. The honest comparison covers when it is and when it is not.

Why route it through one inbox

The average person delegating to Cowork is also running something else: a Claude Code session on a side project, a Codex run, a Cursor agent. Each has its own notification story, which in practice means none of them reliably reach you. One connector and one hook setup put all of them in a single phone inbox with a single history, and every question and answer is kept in an exportable audit trail so you can see what was decided while you were in a meeting.

Full setup details live on the Claude Cowork page and in the docs guide.