One of the best ways to use generative AI is as a thinking partner. Here’s how it helped me get more organised about finding documents on my PC.
There it is again. That sinking feeling. You know you wrote a strategy for a content plan at the start of the year, you know you did good work. Now, you need to see what you said but where – where!? – is the document???
That was happening to me a lot towards the end of 2026, so I decided, as part of my annual small business overhaul, to do something about it.
I knew from past experience that getting yet another organising app was not the answer. I didn’t need a shiny new toy – I needed a way to think about what I already had.
I did some thinking: the blockage in finding a document was often that I didn’t know which particular platform or app I had used to make it. And then I turned to generative AI. I put this prompt into Google’s Gemini tool:
I have documents and notes and lists all over the place: OneDrive, Google Drive, Keep, Upnote, Granola, paper, Sublime Text, Sticky Notes (the app), NotebookLM. I often can’t remember where I put something, or I come across a link I stored months ago and never looked at. I need a super simple system that means I can find things fast, and mine all this for information. I don’t want a recommendation for an app. I want a protocol to use as I work, so that things are findable, actionable and able to be mined for information.
A lengthy back and forth went on after this prompt, but the game-changing insight happened in the very first response, in this apparently innocuous sentence: “To prevent information from getting lost, designate your apps by utility, not by topic.”
There’s an app for that
I don’t know that I had previously been “designating” apps by topic (a typically vague GenAI response) but the idea of looking at all the tools I use and deciding that they each had a particular purpose was just what I needed. I took a decision that, henceforth, this would be how things worked:
For capturing messy, temporary thoughts and ideas: Google Keep, paper, the Granola meeting notes app, Windows Notepad (the built-in app)
For deep work (drafting, editing, long-form writing): Google Drive, OneDrive (which is Microsoft’s cloud storage for things like Word, Excel and PowerPoint docs).
Data mining (synthesis, finding connections, AI analysis): NotebookLM
And I decided to be strict about Google Drive and OneDrive: all the work I do (all of it) for myself or clients must be done in Word or Excel or PowerPoint and stored in OneDrive; only work in which I collaborate with others goes in Google Drive.
As I’ve used the system, I must say that this last rule has probably made the single biggest difference to finding things fast. It’s a very clear divide in my head, and it means I know where to start looking.
Folder structures
Another idea that has made a huge difference is the creation of a “parallel structure”. Gemini said this: “To make this work across different platforms… names (of folders) must be identical everywhere so your brain doesn’t have to ‘translate’ between apps.”
What that means is that I have a set of folders, organised by category and numbered, that are identical in OneDrive and Google Drive. Gemini’s suggestions are derived from Tiago Forte’s second brain idea (for more on that: The PARA Method: The Simple System for Organizing Your Digital Life in Seconds).
My categories/folders and sub-folders might not work for you, but they might give you a place to start:
01 Projects (Active work. Move to Archives once finished.)
- Client work > folders with their name
- Safe Hands AI Training
- Products that I might be making (eg an online course)
02 Areas (Ongoing responsibilities or processes.)
- Finances
- Taxes
- Strategy & Planning (includes time tracking, self-reflection)
- Marketing & Branding
- Learning (materials, exercises, notes from courses or webinars I attend)
- Own writing (as distinct from writing I do for clients or for my own marketing)
03 Resources (Reference material, templates, and “mining” sources)
- Business Templates, Sample Docs, SOPs, Organising Docs
- Research (with subfolders for areas)
- How to do things
- Interesting (anything I can’t quite classify)
04 Archives (Cold storage for completed projects.)
05 Personal
With sub-folders for the various people in my household.
File naming by category
This was probably the second most useful thing suggested by Gemini: that file names should start with the number of the category: if I write a document for a client, the file name must start with “01” (the number assigned to Projects).
I can’t say that this has made searching easier. What it does mean is that when I make the document I am forced to think about where it belongs – and that one thing seems to mean that documents are almost always where I think they should be.
The extended file-naming convention I use goes like this:
01 [client name] [topic] [date of creation]
How this is all working in practice
I think that frustrating moment when I can’t find something is 95% gone. I do still encounter it, often when I am looking for a document older than the start of 2026. That’s because I took a decision not to go back and rename or rearrange older documents. I did do some rearranging of folders – many older projects were moved to archives, for instance.
And things have evolved over the months: at the start I thought I would put all my to-do lists in a folder in OneDrive. But over time I found I was making them all in UpNote (a lightweight note-taking tool I bought some time ago). So all lists now live there – it works because I can get at them quickly.
I’m still not very far down the road of dealing with links that I find as I work my way through emails and such. The original plan entailed finding all these on a Friday afternoon and putting them where they belong (a list of ideas for blog posts, or a topic in NotebookLM). But by the time I hit Friday afternoon, that is the last thing I want to do, and so I don’t do it. I’m still cogitating on how to get this one sorted.
Where does GenAI fit in all this?
This is a good example of how generative AI can be useful: the large language model that Gemini is trained on has no doubt “seen” many iterations of this kind of guide to organisation, but the synthesising of all that information into one set of suggestions was hugely useful.
Now, you don’t need to use Gemini – I suspect any of the available GenAI tools would have done a good job. But you do need to apply your own mind.
My initial thinking about the source of the problem (too many documents spread over too many platforms) meant that I was getting an answer that “talked” to my needs. Several of Gemini’s suggestions were over-engineered or didn’t apply to me – so I ignored them or adapted them.
And now I will save this file where it belongs, with a file name that tells me what it is. And I will always be able to find it again.
Main picture: Tanja Tepavac, Unsplash
Previous Sensible Guide articles
Why that new toy is not as shiny as you think it is – How a simple mid-year review turned into weeks of uncertainty, courtesy of shiny new object syndrome…
The AI tool everybody should be using – NotebookLM – Research assistant and note-taker rolled into one – allow me to introduce you to NotebookLM.
The diary of an AI user: the bad and the good – Generative AI can be overwhelming. But over time, it’s possible to find ways to make it work for you. Here’s how AI use works in practice for me…