What a 70-hour week actually looks like
Lisarah Buss runs three things simultaneously: she teaches AI development to software engineers in Germany, manages a freelance practice building MVPs for clients, and is co-founding a company with a business partner. She also has ADHD and autism — which means her brain is wired to pursue multiple high-intensity things at once, and struggle to stop.
The result was a 70-hour workweek. Not because the work required it — but because without the right system, everything bleeds into everything else. Client projects, company tasks, scheduled automations, research, meeting notes: all of it demanded attention, and there was no clean boundary between "working" and "not working."
The transformation to 15 hours didn't come from doing less. It came from building a system that made delegation — to AI agents and to structure — the default.
The one mindset shift that cut her hours in half
Lisarah had been using Claude for a while before the hours actually dropped. Using AI was reducing cognitive load — "using less brain power per day" — but it wasn't saving time. Tasks were still getting done one at a time, by her.
The shift happened when she changed the prompt structure entirely.
"Something which moved the needle for me was essentially I started to delegate instead of doing things and I started to use agents for it. I'm just writing like a 10-minute prompt. And I just have a cup of coffee. And come back and it's done." — Lisarah Buss
The key addition: make a plan before you execute it. Telling Claude to divide a large task into specialized agents, plan first, then execute — not just to do it — was what turned AI from a productivity aid into an actual delegation layer.
Claude became, in her words, "like my terminal for everything." Meeting transcripts flow in, tasks are created, Google Calendar entries are scheduled — automatically, without her touching the process. That alone saves 10 hours a week.
Where xTiles fits in a system built around delegation
Delegation without structure creates a different kind of chaos: you've offloaded the doing, but nothing is tracking what was done, what's in progress, and what's waiting. That's the gap xTiles fills in Lisarah's workflow.
She structures everything around projects. Each client gets its own project. Her company has its own project. Ongoing processes — like a lead generation system that runs on a schedule and surfaces a list of target companies for her co-founder — live inside the relevant project as scheduled tasks.
Inside the company project in xTiles, Lisarah built an automated lead gen workflow: it monitors signals — news, research, market data — and generates a prioritized list of companies to contact. Her co-founder opens xTiles and the list is already there.
The automation runs on a scheduled task. The output lands in xTiles. No manual work, no copy-pasting between tools.
Her weekly Planner gives her a single view across all projects: client work, company tasks, her own priorities — in one place, connected to Google Calendar. She doesn't need to check five different places to know what to work on today.
Why she chose xTiles over Notion for her company
When Lisarah and her co-founder needed a shared workspace — a single source of truth for their growing company — the obvious candidate was Notion. It's where most teams land. She chose xTiles instead.
The reasoning wasn't about features. It was about overhead. Notion at a serious level requires significant setup investment: database schemas, relations, templates, a specific kind of technical patience. "If I'm going to go hyper technical in Notion, I'm just going to do that in Excel" — a sentiment that came up independently from multiple xTiles users we spoke with.
For a two-person company moving fast, xTiles gives the structure without the maintenance cost. Projects, tasks, shared visibility — and a Planner that makes sure daily work doesn't get buried in the project hierarchy.
The setup: how to build a similar system
Lisarah's system isn't magic — it's a set of deliberate choices about where things live and how they connect. Here's the structure, translated into steps anyone can follow:
One project per context
Every client, every company initiative, every major area of work gets its own xTiles project. This keeps contexts clean — you're never looking at Client A's tasks while trying to think about Client B. When you open a project, you're fully in that world.
📁 Company (your own business) 📁 Client A 📁 Client B 📁 Admin & Operations
Schedule recurring automations as tasks
Anything that runs on a cadence — weekly reports, lead generation, data pulls, email marketing checks — becomes a scheduled task inside the relevant project. The task is a reminder and a record: when it runs, it ran, and where the output lives.
Use the weekly Planner as your single daily view
Every task across every project flows into My Planner when it has a due date. Open Planner in the morning and your full day is already assembled — client work, company priorities, personal tasks. One tab, not five.
Connect Google Calendar for time context
With Google Calendar connected, your meetings appear in Planner's time-blocking view alongside your tasks. You see exactly how much focus time you actually have before your next call — which is usually less than you think.
Delegate with a plan prompt, not just a do prompt
When sending a large task to Claude or another AI agent, use this structure: "Here is the task. Divide it into specialized sub-agents. Make a plan. Then execute." The planning step is what makes agents produce usable output instead of plausible-sounding noise.
If you want to go further and connect xTiles directly to Claude — so your AI can read your projects, create tasks, and update your Planner automatically — the xTiles + Claude integration makes that possible without any custom code.