A good ranking that ends up in a file
Lindsey has used xTiles for a couple of years. She's mostly worked with ChatGPT, and recently started using Claude for co-working. One of the first things she set up there was an email workflow: Claude goes through her inbox and ranks what came in by priority.
The ranking itself worked. The problem was where it went. Each run produced a file, and a file is a snapshot. It doesn't know which of yesterday's top items you handled, which ones you pushed, or which email has sat at the top for a week.
What she wanted was a track record, and that's the difference between a ranking and a task list. This guide shows how to get from one to the other.
From ranking to tasks in four steps
Connect xTiles to Claude
Connecting Claude takes three clicks. Keep your email connected as well, so Claude can read the inbox it ranks.
Keep your ranking prompt, change the output
You don't need a new workflow. Take the prompt that already ranks your emails and replace "save it to a file" with: create an xTiles task for each email that needs action.
Map the rank to task priority
Ask Claude to carry its ranking over as the task's priority — high, medium or low — and to set a due date. Claude already sets priority and a due date on the tasks it creates, so the ranking stays visible on every task.
Keep the link to the email
Ask for a link back to the original thread on each task. When you open the task later, the email is one click away instead of a search.
A ranking covers every email; a task list shouldn't. Tell Claude to create tasks only for emails that need a reply or a decision, and to leave newsletters and receipts out.
What tasks give you that a file never will
- One place to act. Tasks with a due date show up in My Planner, next to the rest of your day, instead of in a folder you have to remember to open.
- Progress you can see. Check an email task off and it stays in your planner as done. A week later, you can see what you actually handled.
- Nothing silently drops. An email you didn't get to can be rescheduled to today automatically instead of disappearing into yesterday's file.
Use the track record
Once rankings live as tasks, your planner becomes a history Claude can read. Ask it to look at this week, or further back, and answer questions a file never could: which high-priority emails are still open, which sender keeps landing at the top, which task has moved day after day without a reply.
It works the other way too. Seeing the email tasks you completed next to everything else in a week often shows you got more done than you thought.
Run it every morning
When the prompt works by hand, schedule it. A morning run means the ranked email tasks are already in your planner when you sit down. See how to schedule an AI daily brief for the setup.