My Downloads Folder is a Mess

It was clean two weeks ago, I swear. But yet again, my downloads folder has become a mountainous dump of assorted images, videos, several documents with at least five different versions of each, audio files, app installers, spreadsheets, and what might possibly be a virus or two?? My friend has a chronic hoarding problem and even they held an intervention for me 😖.

Fig 1. My downloads folder. Maybe the intervention was warranted ...

Photo by Collab Media on Unsplash

It's gotten so bad that everytime I muster up the motivation to clean it, the sheer number and diversity of content in the folder makes me question why I had the gall to even try. I just really dread having to manually prune away uneeded files and sort away the rest into the right spots elsewhere in my computer. It's a benign enough problem that I can procrastinate it without consequence, but it just gets worse with every new download. (Yeah, yeah I know I should put things in the right spot when I first download it, but I haven't yet unlocked 'discpline' and 'organization' in my skill tree 🤷‍♀️).

It would be pretty nice if I could at least group the files into bins like "Office Work", "Audio", "Video", "Images", and "Apps", etc. But even forcing myself to spend time doing that step is pretty daunting, especially when I have so many other things to do.

Of course, the biggest issue is I know that even if I get super motivated and power through it, the folder will become a landfill of files in two weeks. The last intervention was super cringe, I don't think I could handle another one 😭.

If only there was an easy, repeatable, and automatic way to organize my downloads folder ...

✏️ Section in Progress. Come back soon.