Task apps get things done. They don't tell you why.
Carleen runs her day-to-day work through Sunsama — pulling tasks in from email, ClickUp, and Slack, then working through them one at a time. It's effective at getting things done. What it doesn't give her is context: "since Sunsama for me is just getting the stuff done, but it's not tied to any big picture — you always forget, like, why am I working." That gap is what pulled her toward xTiles: somewhere to hold the bigger picture her task list alone couldn't.
The moment inbox zero clicked
Before automating anything, she was already managing her inbox by hand, one email at a time — a manual process she said actually worked for her: "when I use it, it does work because I don't have to... I can just move stuff over here." Mid-conversation, describing that habit out loud, the fix occurred to her on the spot: "I think I can set it so that anything that requires action gets a label — 'action needed' — and just move it out. And then everything else can just be archived."
That's the whole shift: the same decision she was already making by hand, every email, every time — turned into a rule Claude applies for her instead.
How the automation actually works
Set up as a recurring, scheduled review, the same task checks the inbox on its own — no need to open Gmail and go through it manually. Anything that genuinely needs a response gets labeled and pulled out; everything else gets archived without her having to look at it first.
She didn't need to set the label up in advance, either — as it was put to her directly: "you don't need to create a label by your own. It can create everything." One instruction, applied consistently, every time the review runs.
The same idea, more places
She was already applying this exact logic manually in Slack too — dragging a message into a task the moment it needed action, rather than leaving it sitting in the channel. As she described her own workaround: "I could just go here and create a task... something comes up, and I go, oh, let me action [it]." The automation doesn't introduce a new way of deciding what matters. It just removes the part where she has to do the deciding by hand, message by message, email by email.
Getting unstuck on a daily brief that kept needing her to show up
She'd started building a daily brief on her own before this and gotten stuck on the same problem: "I feel like I'm having to go in every time." The fix was scheduling the same prompt as a recurring task instead of running it manually. Once it's set to run in the cloud — she picked 6 a.m. — the brief, and the labeled inbox, are already sitting there the next time she opens her laptop. Nothing to remember to trigger.