The problem: one long scrolling tile instead of a scannable brief
Bob splits his time between two jobs — a consultant during the day, and a telehealth mental health counselor on nights and weekends — and had already connected Claude to xTiles with a daily morning brief running as a scheduled task. The problem wasn't that it didn't work. It was that everything landed inside a single tile that read like a long email thread — calendar, inbox, and notes all mixed together, requiring constant scrolling just to find one piece of information.
Step 1: Ask Claude to split the brief by content type
The fix doesn't happen inside xTiles — it happens back in Claude, where the original prompt lives. Open the scheduled task generating the brief, and ask Claude directly to rewrite the prompt so the result lands as several smaller tiles grouped by content type — calendar, inbox, tasks — instead of one long block of text.
Rather than waiting for the next scheduled run to see if the change worked, use the "Run now" option on the task to test the new version immediately.
The catch: scheduled tasks only run while your machine is on
A scheduled task tied to your laptop only fires if the laptop happens to be open and awake at that exact moment. Open it five minutes late, or leave it closed overnight, and the brief simply doesn't happen that day — which defeats the point of having it waiting for you each morning.
Step 2: Move the same prompt into a cloud Routine
A Routine runs on Claude's own servers rather than your machine, so it fires on schedule whether your laptop is open, closed, or asleep. Setting one up starts with connecting GitHub as a connector — under Customize → Connectors, search for GitHub, connect it, and install and authorize the Claude GitHub app. If you don't already have a repository, create one (a private one is the safer default) to give the routine somewhere to run from.
From there, create a new Routine, select that repository, and give it a name. Paste in the same prompt already used in your local scheduled task, choose a model, and set the schedule you want. It's also worth trimming the connector list down to only what the brief actually needs — Gmail, Calendar, and xTiles, for example — rather than leaving every available connector switched on.
Step 3: Pause the old scheduled task
Once the cloud routine has run successfully at least once, pause the original local scheduled task rather than leaving both active — otherwise the same brief gets generated twice, once from each source.
Making it run all seven days, not just weekdays
A few days after the initial setup, extending the routine to run every day instead of only on weekdays is a small change inside the routine's own trigger settings — no need to rebuild anything else.
Beyond the morning brief
The same cloud-routine pattern — a prompt, a schedule, a connector list — extends to other automations once it's set up the first time: a daily news digest on topics you follow, or an end-of-day reflection that reviews what actually got done and logs it automatically. Each one is its own routine, built the same way as the first.