The announcement
On a recent live webinar, Jason — an executive function coach and instructor who sits on the advisory board of the National Board of Executive Function Coaches (NBEFC) — shared some news: the board had decided that xTiles would be the official software used to train executive function coaches through its certification process.
For xTiles, this sits alongside partnerships with communities like EDA in Canada and the Onward Rising program, and it lands close to home: our founder has ADHD, and when we surveyed the team, roughly half of us do too. The product wasn't designed for executive function work on purpose — the feedback from ADHD users is what pointed us there.
The National Board of Executive Function Coaches certifies executive function coaches in the United States. Choosing one tool as the training standard means every newly certified coach learns the same system — and can hand it directly to clients.
What executive function coaching needs from a tool
Executive function coaching is, in large part, about externalizing the things a working-memory deficit makes hard to hold: what matters most right now, what's been started, what can wait. The tool a coach teaches has to do that job without forcing everyone into the same rigid structure.
That's why the flexibility matters. As Jason put it on the call, xTiles is diverse enough that it "could really fit the needs of whatever — from a C-level executive down to a middle-school homeschooler. It lets you build what you need." Two of his students joined the webinar to make the point: one, 16, at boarding school, wanted somewhere to catch the small daily tasks her academic calendar didn't hold; the other, 14, homeschooled, was using it to stay on top of chores.
Same tool, same building blocks — a visual, tile-based canvas plus a built-in digital planner — shaped to fit very different lives. A coach can teach one system and trust it will bend to each client.
Beyond the paper planner
Search for help right after an ADHD diagnosis and the first advice is almost always the same: buy a paper planner. For a lot of people it doesn't stick — the handwriting is a struggle, and the planner itself gets left behind somewhere. When the system goes out of sight, it goes out of mind.
A digital planner solves the physical problems: it travels on every device, it's always where you left it, and it pulls scattered inputs into one place instead of asking you to copy them by hand. The visual layout keeps the paper-planner feel — sections you can see at a glance — without the paper-planner failure modes.
A calendar is not a plan
One student already ran her academic life on Google Calendar and liked it. The point isn't to replace that. xTiles connects to Google Calendar and Outlook, so events show up on your daily page automatically — it's not either/or.
What a calendar doesn't do is rank anything. Every entry is just an event at a time. It has no place for a priority, a note, a task, or the context around why something matters. xTiles adds that layer: a daily page that reads like a dashboard — tasks, notes, and calendar events together, with priorities you can set and drag to the top. Unfinished tasks move forward to the next day instead of disappearing.
The dopamine of visible progress
One workflow got a strong reaction from the coaches on the call. At the end of the day, an AI assistant connected to xTiles reviews the work you actually did — across email, calendar, meeting notes, and your projects — and writes the finished items into your task list as completed tasks.
It sounds small. It isn't. ADHD brains often end a genuinely productive day looking at a near-empty task list and concluding they got nothing done. Seeing the day's real work laid out as checked-off items is an honest reward — and, as Jason noted, "that reward makes you want to do it again tomorrow." Externalizing progress is as much a part of executive function support as externalizing the plan.
A coaching tool has to support two things: deciding what matters, and seeing that you followed through. A flat to-do list does neither well. A visual planner that carries priorities forward and reflects real progress back does both.
What this means for coaches and clients
For coaches training through NBEFC, it means learning one system well enough to teach it — and knowing every client can start on the free tier without a barrier. For clients, it means the tool your coach uses is the same one you keep using afterward.
The AI workflows — a morning brief, newsletter summaries, an end-of-day review — are an optional layer on top, set up once from the AI integrations settings with a guided prompt. No coding, no certification in prompt-writing required. Coaches and clients can adopt them whenever they're ready, or never, and the core planner works the same either way.