The multi-location information problem
Most productivity tools were designed for a single team in a single place. But operations work rarely looks like that.
When you manage eight clinic locations — each with its own staff, schedules, protocols, and department-specific procedures — the information problem is real. Where does a nurse at location three find the onboarding checklist? Where do department leads post updated workflows? How does the operations manager know which tasks her assistants have completed and which are still pending?
The default answer for most healthcare practices is a patchwork: shared drives with folders no one can navigate, email threads that bury critical information, and whiteboards that only one location can see. The operations manager ends up as the human router — constantly fielding questions whose answers already exist somewhere.
Why standard tools make it worse
The tools most practices reach for each solve part of the problem — and introduce new ones.
Shared drives (Google Drive, SharePoint) hold files, but they offer no visual structure. You can create folders, but staff still have to navigate a hierarchy to find what they need. And when the hierarchy grows across departments and locations, it stops making sense to anyone but the person who built it.
Team messaging apps (Slack, Teams) are great for real-time communication but terrible for reference information. Important protocols buried in a channel from three months ago are effectively gone.
Project management platforms (Asana, Monday, Notion) assume a single organization with consistent access. When half your staff are on free accounts and the other half aren't even sure they have logins, adoption collapses. The system becomes the manager's burden, not the team's tool.
xTiles as a shared staff knowledge base
The operations manager at a family practice managing eight locations and around 300 employees solved this with a different approach: she uses xTiles as a visual database that her entire staff can access.
Each department gets its own section. Staff at any location can open the relevant project and find what they need — protocols, reference materials, onboarding documents, department-specific information — organized visually rather than buried in folders.
The key difference from a shared drive is the visual layer. xTiles pages are spatial: information is arranged in tiles and sections that make sense at a glance. Staff quickly learn where to look. The friction that kills adoption in most knowledge systems — "I know the info exists, I just can't find it" — disappears.
"They all love it — the aesthetic, everything's so organized." Operations Manager, multi-location family practice
Critically, staff on the free tier can still access shared workspaces. In a practice where not every employee has a dedicated software budget, this matters: the knowledge base works for everyone, not just the people with paid seats.
How to set up xTiles for multi-location operations
Create one Workspace per organizational context
Separate the staff knowledge base from internal team management. The shared staff workspace holds information the whole practice needs. A second workspace — visible only to the operations manager and her assistants — holds task tracking and internal work.
📁 Staff Knowledge Base (shared with all locations) 📁 Operations Team (internal — manager + assistants only)
Structure by department, not by location
Organizing by location creates duplication: each location ends up with the same types of information, just in separate silos. Organizing by department — Reception, Clinical, HR, Compliance — means each team knows exactly where their information lives, regardless of which location they work at.
📁 Staff Knowledge Base └── 📋 Reception & Front Desk └── 📋 Clinical Protocols └── 📋 HR & Onboarding └── 📋 Compliance & Procedures └── 📋 Department Updates
Use the Web Clipper to capture and file information instantly
The xTiles Web Clipper browser extension (available for Chrome and Microsoft Edge) lets you save any web content — regulatory guidance, procedure updates, external resources — directly to the right project. No copy-pasting, no context-switching.
Create a separate team project for task management
The staff knowledge base is read-only for most people. But the operations manager also runs a project just for her assistants and direct team — where she assigns tasks, tracks progress, and can see at a glance what is done and what is pending.
Let My Planner pull everything together
Every task assigned across all projects — whether in the staff workspace or the internal team project — surfaces automatically in My Planner when it has a date. The operations manager opens one view and sees everything that needs attention today, across all contexts, without opening multiple tabs or apps.
What the daily workflow looks like
For an operations manager juggling staff across eight locations, the day is a constant stream of requests, updates, and context-switching. xTiles reduces the overhead without adding more tools to the stack.
Morning: Open My Planner. All pending tasks — from the team project, from personal to-dos — are in one view, organized by date. No hunting across apps.
During the day: When a staff member asks about a procedure, share the relevant page link from the staff workspace. The answer is already there; no email required.
Capturing new information: Use the Web Clipper to save updated guidelines or policy documents directly to the right department project before the tab closes.
End of day: Review the team project. See which tasks assistants have completed. Add new tasks for tomorrow. The Planner updates automatically.
Because xTiles is visual rather than list-based, the overview feels immediate. A project page for a department looks like a dashboard — not a task queue. Staff can find what they need without being trained on a system.
The unexpected extra: it works for studying too
One detail that stands out about this particular user's setup: she is also enrolled in school while managing the practice. And xTiles handles that too — without needing a separate tool.
She keeps a dedicated project for study notes. The Web Clipper makes capturing content from readings fast — highlight a section of an online article, save it directly to the study project. The notes stay organized in the same visual environment as everything else.
With the Claude MCP integration, the notes become interactive: ask Claude to read a study project as context, then create a quiz, summarize a chapter, or help prepare for a test — without re-describing everything from scratch.
It's not a use case most productivity tools are designed to support: serious professional work and serious personal development, in the same workspace. xTiles handles both because the structure — Projects, a Planner, the Web Clipper — is flexible enough to fit either.