End the messy downloads folder: set rules once and relax
A calm computer starts with a calm Downloads folder. If that landing zone stays noisy, everything downstream gets messy: invoices pile up with cryptic names, screenshots sprawl across months, and the one PDF you need at 4:59 p.m. plays hide-and-seek. You don’t need a new app or a weekly declutter sprint; you need a handful of rules that run every day without your attention. The idea is simple. Treat Downloads as a short-term staging lane, give new files names that actually say what they are, route them into shallow homes that won’t change, and add a few guardrails so an automation running twice never hurts anything. Do this once and your folders begin to feel self-cleaning. Files appear where you would have filed them by hand. Search starts working like memory. And you stop spending your best minutes retyping names and dragging icons around the screen.