The old way: wiring every app in, one at a time
For a long time, pulling your work into one place meant integrating each tool separately — a calendar connection here, an inbox connection there, a Slack hook somewhere else. Every app was its own project, and the list of things to wire up never really ended. Even on our own team, that's how we approached it: one integration at a time.
The result was the same problem in a different shape. Instead of checking five apps every morning, you were maintaining five integrations — and still checking most of them by hand anyway.
The shift: let the AI tool that already has your connectors do the pulling
The MCP integration flips the approach. Instead of connecting each app to xTiles individually, you connect one AI tool — Claude or ChatGPT — that already holds all of your connectors: Gmail or Outlook, Slack or Microsoft Teams, your calendar, your meeting-notes tool, and more. xTiles becomes the place the output lands, and the AI does the gathering.
It's a one-button connection from Account Settings → xTiles MCP, or by searching "xTiles" inside ChatGPT's own connector directory. Connect whichever you already use — or both.
What "every tool" actually covers
Because the brief runs through your AI tool's connectors, one pass can reach across your whole stack. In practice that means:
- Inbox — Gmail or Outlook, surfacing what genuinely needs a reply: users, partners, anything time-sensitive.
- Messaging — Slack or Microsoft Teams, with the key points from each channel and links back to the open threads so you don't have to dig.
- Meeting notes — if you use a tool like Read.ai, the next-step and action items from yesterday's calls, so nothing quietly drops.
- Tasks — anything overdue from the day before, carried forward to today automatically.
- Newsletters and news — the unread newsletters folded into one summary, plus a 24-hour news pass if you want it.
Each of these lands as its own tile on the day's page — assembled for you, not by you.
One prompt, one pass
The part that makes this feel different is that it's a single request, not a checklist. You ask your AI tool to review all of your connectors — inbox, messaging, meeting notes, overdue tasks, newsletters — and write the results into today's planner page. It goes through each source in one pass and creates the tiles automatically.
This is the exact workflow we run every day internally. Once it's set up, it can run on a schedule, so the brief is already sitting in xTiles by the time you open your laptop — no manual step to remember.
It works for a whole team — and on the free plan
This isn't only a solo trick. Each person on a team connects their own AI tool to their own planner, so everyone gets a brief shaped by their own inbox and channels. We recently walked a school-district technology team through it — a mix of free and paid members — and the same one-prompt brief works across all of them.
You don't need a paid Claude or ChatGPT subscription for it to work; the free versions connect the same way. And for shared work, a project-level planner rolls every teammate's tasks into one view — so alongside your personal brief, the team's deadlines and to-dos sit in a single place too.
The same connectors, reviewed again at day’s end
The brief has a natural bookend. At the end of the day, the same setup can review everything again — what the day was actually about, what got done, any new opportunities that surfaced, and what to be ready for tomorrow — and drop it onto the day's page as a snapshot. Morning gives you a running start; evening closes the loop.