Before xTiles: a to-do list living inside a Claude chat
Jackie, a graduate student juggling a dissertation and an internship, had already built herself a working system before she ever opened xTiles: a single Claude conversation set up as her day. It had her calendar for today, a high-priority section, and a pending list underneath — and she kept it current the same way you'd edit a note, typing things like "remove this, add this" whenever her day changed.
The worry: won't this just be Notion again, but scattered?
Her hesitation about moving off that setup was specific: she'd used Notion before, and worried that splitting her life into separate xTiles spaces and projects — one for school, one for personal, sub-projects for dissertation and internship — meant she'd eventually stop checking one of them and forget what was sitting there. The concern wasn't about the tool being hard to learn; it was about ending up with too many places to remember to look.
The answer is that none of that separation is required day to day. My Planner sits above every space and project and automatically pulls in anything with a due date, regardless of which project it belongs to. Keeping dissertation and internship as separate projects is still useful for organizing the underlying work, but staying on top of today only means opening one page.
The same Claude habit, pointed at a page instead of a chat window
Rather than replace the habit, connecting Claude to xTiles gives the same conversation a destination. After adding xTiles as a connector in Claude's settings, one prompt starts the setup: "set workflow of daily brief on xTiles MCP." Claude then walks through a short form — your role, which tools it should pull from, and what you actually want to see each morning — before generating a first version to review.
What lands on the page without you asking twice
Once approved, the brief runs itself: overdue tasks carried forward from the day before, Slack threads and mentions worth a look, an inbox pass that triages important messages and folds newsletters into a summary instead of leaving them to pile up, and highlights pulled from meeting notes tools like Granola. Everything appears as tiles on the day's page in My Planner — no separate app to check, no scrolling back through a chat to find what mattered.
Why a page beats a chat thread for this
Jackie's direct question was fair: if Claude already knows her list, why not just ask it "what's on my plate today" instead of moving anything? The difference shows up over time rather than on day one. A chat thread is a single, ever-growing scroll — checking last week means scrolling back through messages to find it. My Planner turns each day into its own page, so paging back a week or a month is the same motion as flipping back through a paper planner, with the daily brief, tasks, and notes for that specific day still sitting exactly where they landed.
A completed-tasks list, without having to keep looking at it
One habit carried over directly from her Claude thread: asking to see everything she'd finished. As she put it herself, with ADHD, once something's done she doesn't want it sitting in front of her anymore — but it's still satisfying to ask for the full list on demand. The daily brief handles this the same way at the end of the day, building a reflection tile that surfaces what got done and what stood out, without keeping finished items cluttering the active view. It's a smaller piece of the same end-of-day reflection workflow other users run on a full evening routine.