A systems administrator, organizing her whole life visually
Melissa is a senior systems administrator for a federal government agency who also identifies as having ADHD. Outside work, she'd built out an entire personal Family Space inside xTiles — weekend planning, a running garden tracker connecting what's planted to reference information, and a full meal-planning setup linking recipes to ingredients and current stock levels. All of it lives as one connected, visual space rather than a folder tree.
That depth of setup made her a genuinely useful person to compare tools with — she wasn't asking what a workspace app could do in general. She was asking why the usual folder-and-hierarchy approach kept breaking down for her specifically, and what a spatial, visual layout does differently.
A comparison only an IT background would make
The clearest articulation of the problem came from Melissa herself, drawing on her own professional background: rigid folder-based tools get used the same way enterprises misuse Active Directory — a hierarchical system meant for access control and structure, repurposed as a visual separation tool it was never built for. Forcing a nested folder tree to double as a way to see your life and work runs into the same mismatch.
It's a sharp way of naming something a lot of people feel without being able to articulate it: folders are for finding things you already know the name and location of. They're a poor substitute for actually seeing everything at once.
Out of sight, out of mind — and why that matters more with ADHD
There's a recognizable pattern in how a lot of ADHD users end up organizing: everything gets kept in one project, on purpose, because anything filed away in a separate folder risks disappearing from attention entirely. It's not disorganization — it's a reasonable adaptation to how attention actually works.
The tradeoff is real: pack too much into one place and it turns into a wall of tabs and pages that's hard to navigate. Split things into too many separate folders and pieces quietly stop getting looked at. A spatial, visual canvas doesn't force a choice between the two extremes — related things can stay near each other without being buried three folders deep or thrown into one undifferentiated pile.
What that looks like in practice, not theory
Melissa's meal-planning setup is a concrete example of what a connected, tagged system looks like instead of a folder tree. Recipes reference their ingredients directly; ingredients connect to current stock levels; a grocery list pulls from what's actually low. None of that relationship would survive being split across nested folders — it depends on pieces of information staying linked and visible together, which is exactly what Collections are built for.
The same logic carried over to her garden tracker: a running record of what's currently planted, connected to reference information about each plant, built and refined over time rather than filed away and forgotten.
A system still being refined, on purpose
None of this is presented as a finished, perfect setup — Melissa is still actively reworking parts of it, from the grocery list logic to how her garden tracker connects to reference data. That's arguably the point: a visual, spatial workspace is easier to keep adjusting over time than a folder hierarchy, where restructuring often means untangling where everything was filed in the first place.