How to create a DAILY Planner with xTiles (+ free template & tutorial) | Notion Alternative

For those struggling with Notion or tired of searching for the perfect template, we'll demonstrate how to quickly create your own daily planner through xTiles. xTiles is a new tool that is visually appealing and could be easier than Notion because of its intuitive drag-and-drop features. With xTiles, it's easy to plan, take notes, manage tasks, brainstorm, and coordinate projects. In this video, we'll be going over how we use xTiles and help you craft your own daily planner. Watch the video to the end to receive a template for free. If you find this useful, be sure to like, subscribe, and turn on the notification bell. So first, we wanted to just show you around the daily planner and how we use xTiles. So in this daily planner, on the left side, we have a widget which shows the day, which is really nice for a daily planner. And then here is kind of like a time block schedule, and it's really useful because it's so easy to customize and kind of jot things down as things go and plan for the day that way. Then underneath, we have places for notes. So for example, here I've written, issues regarding our store needs to be taken care of and investigated. So just quick notes can be jotted down here. And what's also really interesting is that you can actually go to your inbox here. And if you had any notes that pop up during the day, you could just drag this into here as well. And then here, there are some useful links. So there's some productivity links and then some favorite music. So this is a great way to keep track of any kinds of bookmarks you want to keep on your homepage. Then here we have this month's goals. So I have read two books, go to gym three times a week, and learn a new productivity tool. So it's such a good way to remind about the month's goals and keep motivated that way. Then on here, there's the to-do list. So this is also really useful because you can add these to-do items and also add a date. So for example, here I need to book a hotel for an upcoming vacation and I've set the date to April 10th and for it to remind me at 10 AM. So then I can actually set it reminder this way. These tasks are shown up into this task calendar here that is conveniently added as a tab. So you can just see things like this. There's also an archive. So every time you're done with a daily plan, your notes or the tasks, and if you just want to put them away without deleting everything, you can easily put them here and still keep track of them. So that's the basic overview of this daily planner. So next we'd like to show you exactly how to build it step-by-step. The first thing you'll need to do if you're new to xTiles is simply go to xTiles and download it for either Mac or Windows. And you can also use xTiles on the desktop. So all of these are ways to access this app and you'll need to make an account. So we're going to go with an empty page first. And to get to the empty page, you'll need to go to your workspaces and simply click new project and you can go with start from scratch. So here we have a completely empty xTiles project. And what's great is that you can simply just start by dragging around here and creating boxes. So it's so easy to start in xTiles that you can just simply create a bunch of boxes and that's how we started with the daily planner. So for example, we just have four boxes here now and you can just drag and hold and change the different shapes of the boxes. And let's go ahead and type a title here. So we're going to call this our daily planner and we're going to remove the icon by clicking here and clicking remove. And then the first thing we're going to be adding is actually the widget so that we can see the day. So we're going to just change this a bit so that it's 13 here and do the same here. So this is going to just show the widget. So to get the widget we recommend you to go to widget box and you will need to make an account to access this but basically once you're in widget box you can just create a simple calendar. And we already have one here as you can see and we match the gray color to match xTiles gray and all you have to do is simply click copy. Then we're going to go back to xTiles and here we're just going to type slash and then embed and we can paste it in and you will need to drag this so that the size matches. So once we get around here then we can adjust this as well. So now we have our calendar widget on this side that shows the exact date we're on right now. Next let's work on our daily schedule. So if we go ahead and click this button tile style we can actually style it with various different stylings. And for us we like minimal so we're going to go with this one which we think looks quite nice and with the gray color. Now let's go ahead and move this over here and we'll also just move this down so we can drag this over like this to fill the whole space. And this will be today's schedule. So all we want is a table so we're gonna add it in. Then once we have the table we can actually edit it a bit. So if we go to the six dots we can choose either hide header row, hide header icons and we are going to go with hide header icons. And then we're going to actually delete this column and move this all the way across. And this side is going to be the time so we're going to type time and this one is going to be your schedule. So now you can start filling it in with your time blocks. So in this case we're going to be starting from 8am so we'll put 8am to 9am but this is really up to you how you want to kind of time block your schedule. So now we basically filled in the whole schedule and next we can work on our monthly goals on this side. So this one's going to be called monthly goals and we're going to go ahead and again choose the tile style to be this one with the top bar. And let's go ahead and change the color also to gray. And inside here we're going to add a mood photo so for that we can type slash image and we can put an image in here and it does links on splash which has a huge stock library so we can just type motivation. So some kind of picture that could give us some motivation would be nice. So let's go with this one remember why you started and we can make it a little bit smaller so we have some space to write under it and here we're going to add some check boxes you can type slash check box or checklist. So here you would have some space to add your monthly goals and then we can type command D to duplicate it. We can also adjust this length here as well. The next thing we're going to build is our to-do list so we can go ahead and drag this one that we've already made over here and let's make it the same size and this is going to be called to-do list. And here we're going to add slash and then we're going to choose a red banner for high priority then we're going to type slash then we're going to choose a yellow banner for medium priority and then under here we're going to type slash and banner and go for a blue for low priority and then finally here we're going to type and add banner for done. So inside of each we can also change the color by highlighting it and then we can change this one to red you can change this one to orange then we can change this one to blue and finally we can change this one to green and inside here we're going to be adding some tasks so we're going to add task here and task here so enter slash task and we can drag it here when it's done. Then here we have our notes so we're just going to simply drag this out like this and kind of shrink it a bit and we can call this notes and we can put bullet points by typing a dash and space and if you want more of them you can do command or ctrl d like this then under the notes we're going to have a space for useful links so we can again just drag to create this and let's actually adjust this a bit here then here we're going to add useful links and here we need to also do the same styling so we're going to go with this one and gray of course you're welcome to choose any color you wish and we're going to do the same with this one so now we're going to add some useful links so we like to collect productivity links so we're going to do that here so slash toggle and productivity so if you tend to collect a lot of links this might be a nice way to just make sure that they don't clog the whole page and we can open it up and then type slash link and bookmark so we can just make some open spots like this for adding a web bookmark you can do the same slash link bookmark so now we can hide it like this so here we can also add another toggle slash toggle list and let's go ahead and put some favorite music here so you can just simply attach the links to your Spotify playlist for example so here we can type again slash link so that we can just add some spots for those and we can just slide this out a bit like this so the basic format is structure is now here the next thing we're going to actually add is a tab that's going to show your tasks here so for that we're just going to click plus and we're going to add calendar view and we're going to call this tasks and inside tasks we can go to this gear icon and make sure that show tasks is on so what that means is that if we're in the daily planner and we assign a task to a specific day then we can simply put for example task one click the calendar icon and let's say we assign it for tomorrow at 9 a.m then you can see it at tomorrow at 9 a.m and then if we go to the tasks you can actually see this reflected into the calendar and you can take it off if it's done so this is also a really nice feature of xtiles then the other tab we're going to create is going to be an archive and this is going to be in table view and we're going to call this archive so how we recommend you to use this is to first duplicate it and then you can go ahead and move this to archive so once you've moved that over you can drag the new schedule back up here again then if you check in the archive your previous today's schedule should be there like this and we're going to go ahead and add a select here that's going to be the type and a date property so here you can put that this is a schedule and then another option might be a task and another could be a note so in this way you can kind of keep an archive of your notes or your tasks and we can keep them all in gray so this one is a schedule so we're going keep it as schedule and the date we added it could be today so now you can store a copy of your schedule and have a sort of log here as well and let's say that you have so many on your to-do list that now you want to archive it you can also simply duplicate first then you can move it to your archive same can be done with your notes so if you're done with your notes you've taken care of them you can actually simply click this button and move to after you do a duplicate so that's how we would recommend you to refresh this and finally let's go ahead and also change the cover photo so it matches this color scheme so we're going to go with something minimal and we'll just choose this one and reposition so now we basically have our daily planner we have a place for our schedule our notes our useful links then our monthly goals and our to-do list here which can also be shown on our task calendar you can also see it if you go to this task button here like this and you can also see it in your calendar view like this as well thank you so much for watching if you're interested in xTiles who is the sponsor of today's video we'll leave the link in the description as well as the link to the template if you have any questions or comments feel free to let us know and we hope to see you in the next video

Channel: The Organized Notebook

Views: 548

Keywords: xTiles, digital planner, daily planner, note taking, plan with me, note taking app, XTILES, xtiles, digital planner template, xtiles template, xTiles template, xTile, xTile template, productivity app, xtiles planner, XTiles planner, xTiles planner template, XTILES digital planner, notion alternative, digital productivity app, productivity app review, productivity app tutorial, apps for productivity, xtile app, xTiles app, XTILES app, xtiles app digital planner

Id: H4jS7a8qceA

Length: 14min 13sec (853 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 19 2024