What the Sunday Basket is
The Sunday Basket is a home-organizing routine created by Lisa Woodruff. During the week, anything that needs your attention goes into one basket instead of piling up around the house. Once a week, usually on Sunday, you sit down and sort it: some things go onto the calendar, some get filed with the project they belong to, some wait for next week, and some go away.
The idea translates well to digital tasks, because the problem is the same: ideas arrive anywhere, but you need them organized for the moment you actually do the work.
One user’s digital Sunday Basket
Xia came to xTiles from Amplenote and rebuilt the whole system inside it. The structure:
- A space for each area of responsibility — home management, work, and business, kept apart.
- A Sunday Basket project in each space — with tiles for new ideas, things to review again next week, and what was done, by month.
- Project folders beside it — the projects that live in that area, plus a project for each year.
What made xTiles the right home for it is a balance most task apps miss: tasks are combined where you need to see them, but each one still lives in its own place.
Its ability to combine all of the tasks, but yet still keep them in their home, so that it's not so overwhelming. Xia, on why xTiles fit the system
A task in two places at once
The key detail: in xTiles a task can sit in its project and show up in your planner at the same time. Give a task a date, and it appears on that day in My Planner while staying filed under its project. That is the Sunday Basket's two kinds of filing — by category and by when — without copying anything.
The weekly sort, step by step
Open the basket
Once a week, open the Sunday Basket project in each space and look at the new ideas tile.
Date what has a when
Anything with a specific day gets a date. It now shows up on that day in your planner, and stays in the basket until you file it.
File what has a where
Anything that belongs to a project goes into that project, so you find it next time you open it.
Hold the rest
What isn't ready moves to the review-next-week tile. What is finished goes into this month's done tile, so the year builds a record.
Let Claude do the filing
Sorting is the valuable part of the Sunday Basket. Carrying each item to its folder is the tedious part, and that is the part to hand off. With xTiles connected to Claude or ChatGPT, the assistant can create, edit and move content in your workspace through chat.
So the weekly sort becomes a short conversation. You decide where things go; Claude carries them there. A prompt to start from:
Go through the New ideas tile in my Sunday Basket project. Move each task into the project it belongs to: Kitchen renovation, Garden, 2026 Finances. Add a date to anything with a deadline. Leave anything you're unsure about in the basket and list it for me. Example prompt
Naming the destination projects keeps Claude from guessing. Asking it to leave unclear items for you keeps the actual decisions with you, which is the point of the weekly sort. The same approach works for tidying a whole planner with Claude, where ideas move into their own project.
If you haven't connected an assistant yet, connecting Claude takes three clicks.