Seven AI tools, one recurring problem
Garland Coulson has been a time-management and business coach for years; lately, most of his training work has shifted toward helping people actually put AI into their workflow. He isn't a one-tool person — he picks whichever AI fits the job: Perplexity has fully replaced Google search for him, Gemini handles general chat and image generation, Claude does the writing that needs to "touch the heart" (plus a handful of mini apps and calculators he's built in it), Gamma builds his presentations, NotebookLM does source-controlled deep research, and a mind-mapping AI tool sketches out complex projects. He was also, at the time we talked, just starting to test a new personal-knowledge-management tool that auto-indexes his hard drive and everything he browses.
Seven tools, seven use cases, no confusion about which one to reach for. The problem shows up later: finding something again. "I might have had 50 chats that mentioned the word Reddit in the last month," he said, describing what happens when he tries to relocate a specific brainstorm. Some tools offer folders for organizing chats — Claude has Projects, an extension bolted folders onto Gemini after the fact — but none of them, in his experience, offer the subfolders an agency-style workload actually needs: a client, and inside it, separate buckets for marketing, social, and strategic planning.
Where xTiles already fit in
Before any of this came up, Garland was already using xTiles as his daily planner and daily task list — not something he needed convincing on. His projects map cleanly onto how his work actually breaks down: marketing and content creation as ongoing projects that never really finish, writing and publishing as its own project for the fantasy books he's working on, a dedicated project per client, and a catch-all project called Admin for the things that don't belong anywhere else — a subscription renewal to decide on, a monthly utility bill to remember.
That last category matters more than it looks. Not everything is a project with a finish line; some things are recurring life-admin that still needs a home so it doesn't quietly get forgotten.
The fix that's actually working: linking straight back to the chat
Garland's answer to the "which chat was that in" problem is simple and already running: for a recurring task like posting in one of the Reddit groups he moderates, he opens whichever AI tool he's brainstorming in that day, copies the link to that specific chat, and pastes it directly under the task in xTiles.
From there, the task itself becomes the index. Click the link, land back in the exact conversation, work through the ideas, and check off a box once they're used up — at which point he might move to a different AI tool for the next batch and repeat the pattern. None of the seven tools can reliably search across old chats on their own. The planner, sitting outside all of them, can hold the map.
Any task that starts with an AI brainstorm is a candidate for this: paste the chat link under the task the moment you create it, not after you've already lost track of which tool it was in.
Planner view vs. task view
The second habit worth borrowing is how he decides what shows up where. If a project holds fifty tasks spread across three months — his marketing backlog, for instance — he doesn't want all fifty crowding today's page. Instead, he blocks a chunk of time for "content creation," opens that project's task view directly, and works down the list from there.
The daily planner stays about today. The project's own task list holds everything that's queued but not yet due. Splitting the two views is what keeps a planner usable once a project has real depth to it — nobody wants to open today's tasks and see forty things that aren't actually today's problem.
What he wants AI to do next
Garland's own wishlist points at exactly where the Claude integration is headed. First: AI that looks at his existing tasks, sorts them by project, and sets priorities — rather than only creating new ones. On the same call, we tried an early version of this together: connected via an API token, Claude scanned his Gmail and created a task, unprompted, to follow up on a partnership — the kind of thing that's easy to mean to do and easy to let slide.
Second: subfolders inside a project, so a client isn't one flat bucket but a structured space — marketing, social, strategic planning, each with its own place.
Third, and the most ambitious: an AI that can work across an entire personal knowledge base at once, not just one notebook at a time. He'd run into this limit already with NotebookLM — brilliant within a single notebook, capped at roughly a hundred to three hundred sources, and blind to everything outside it. His hope for xTiles was the reverse: point an assistant at several of his workbooks — or let him choose which ones — and have it pull together something like a standard operating procedure from notes that live in more than one place.