Stop rebuilding, start tweaking
Talia found xTiles through "life OS" videos on YouTube, after months of moving from one system to the next. Every new app meant a fresh setup, and most setups were abandoned a week later. The realization that changed things: a personal system is never finished. It is an onboarding process you keep tweaking.
That shifts the goal. A life OS doesn't have to replace every tool you already like. Talia captures tasks in Todoist and still plans each day on paper, and plans to keep both. What was missing was one central place for everything else, the things that had been scattered across notes apps for years.
What inspiration buckets are
Talia writes fiction and watches a lot of films, but not always for the same reason. Sometimes a film is for rest, sometimes for research, sometimes for a particular mood. A single "to watch" list could never capture that.
I'm viewing it now almost as, like, inspiration buckets. And I mean that in, like, the broadest sense. Talia
An inspiration bucket is a place for things you want at your disposal later: films, books, story ideas, research, things that help you recharge. The trick is that one item can belong to more than one bucket, so when you think about a film night or about your next chapter, the same title can surface in both.
Step 1: build one bucket as a collection
A list in a tile works for a handful of items. For a bucket that grows, use a collection, a page that works like a database. Create a new page in your project and pick table, gallery or board.
Add a row per item
One row per film or book, with the properties you care about: title, author or director, a cover, a description.
Tag it by need, not only by genre
Add a multi-select property and use tags like rest, research, story inspiration. An item can carry several tags at once, which is what makes cross-referencing work.
Add a status
A simple to watch / watched status lets you split the list later without keeping two lists.
Step 2: many views, one collection
This is what replaces the scattered notes. Instead of copying a film into three lists, add views to the same collection. A board grouped by tag shows each bucket as its own column. A filtered view shows only what you haven't watched yet. Another shows everything tagged story inspiration when you sit down to write.
Keep one collection for films and one for books rather than one per mood. Moods and purposes become tags and views, so a new purpose never means a new list.
Step 3: keep Todoist inside a tile
If you like capturing in Todoist, keep doing it. In xTiles, add an embed to a tile and paste your Todoist link, and your tasks show up right on the page, next to your buckets and notes. The same works for a Google Sheet or a PDF.
Tasks you create in xTiles itself land in your planner once they have a date, together with tasks from every other project and your calendar events. So the daily view becomes the dashboard, and the buckets stay a click away.
Step 4: let paper stay paper
A life OS doesn't have to win against pen and paper. If you plan the day by hand, take a photo of the page and upload it to xTiles, and AI transcribes it into text you can search later. The notebook keeps doing its job; the ideas in it stop getting lost.
The same goes for everything you find online. Save an article or a video with the Web Clipper instead of leaving the tab open, and it collects in your Library, a running reference list of everything you saved.
Optional: let Claude carry things between apps
Once the buckets exist, the tedious part is getting things into them. If you use Claude, you can connect it to xTiles and to the apps you already use, like Todoist, Gmail or Slack. Then ask it to bring this week's Todoist tasks into your xTiles planner, or to add the film a friend recommended in an email to your films collection with the right tags.
This step is entirely optional; the buckets work without it. For how the connections fit together, see how xTiles works with hundreds of apps through Claude, and for a ready-made routine, one morning brief from Slack and Gmail.