When agents already fill your to-do list, the problem shifts
Tomek runs a medical-AI business and had already wired agents to pull competitor and market data and drop it straight into his to-do list every morning. That part worked. What didn't was everything downstream of it: too much information, generated fresh each day, with no memory of what had already been decided or done.
His own description of the failure mode is exact: an AI assistant hands you a pile of good information, then forgets by the next session where any of it went. Multiply that by a business that never runs out of things an AI could suggest, and the actual job — deciding what matters today — gets buried under what's merely possible.
The fix he’d already half-built: time and energy labels
Before this conversation, Tomek had already built his own answer by hand: a Kaizen-style breakdown of every task by how long it takes — 2, 5, 10, 25 minutes — plus a second label for the kind of energy it needs: admin, creative, urgent. The point isn't precision. It's matching a task to whatever window and headspace you actually have. Twenty-five minutes free and wiped out? Pull from the creative pile, not the urgent one.
That system lived outside any task tool. The goal on the call was moving it into xTiles, where an AI agent could apply the labels automatically instead of Tomek tagging everything by hand.
Building the time- and energy-tagged task database
Add a custom property to a task
Open any task, click + Property, and choose Select. Name it Time, then add options for however you break it down — 2, 5, 10, 25 minutes, whatever fits. It now appears on every task across your workspace.
Add a second property for energy or mode
The same way, add a second Select property — admin, creative, urgent, or your own categories — for the kind of headspace a task needs rather than how long it takes.
Tag your tasks as you go
Click the property on a task and pick a value. It takes a few seconds, the same way you'd set a priority.
Create a board view grouped by the property
Go to your Tasks collection, click + New view, and group by Time or Energy. You get a board with one column per option — check the time you have, open that column, and pick from what's already filtered instead of scanning a flat list.
Pointed at your tasks collection, Claude already sets priority and a due date on the tasks it creates. Ask it to suggest which of your custom categories a new task belongs in too — you still tag it with one click, but you're choosing from a suggestion instead of starting from a blank task.
Fixing the part labels can't: an AI that forgets overnight
Labels solve too many tasks at once. They don't solve an AI assistant losing track of yesterday. For that, the fix is giving it a fixed place to read from instead of a chat history that resets.
A real example from the same kind of setup: pointed at an inbox, Claude reviews new messages, decides which ones need a response, and creates a task for each — complete with a due date and a link straight back to the original thread, so nothing has to be re-found later. Because those tasks live in the planner rather than in a chat that resets, you can ask Claude to use your planner — today, this week, or further back — as context before it decides what matters most, instead of relying on whatever it happens to remember from the current conversation.