The Perfect Folder System for Google Drive (Part 1)

Because finding your files shouldn’t feel like a digital scavenger hunt

Not a member? Please click here to read the story for free.

After writing about building a second brain with plain text files, something kept bugging me. Sure, we’d solved the note-taking problem, but what about everything else? The presentations, the spreadsheets, the endless PDFs that somehow multiply when you’re not looking?

Last month, I spent three hours searching for a client presentation that I swore I had saved in a “super logical” place. Spoiler: it was in a folder called “Final Final V2 (Use This One).” Sound familiar?

Here’s the thing about Google Drive: it’s like that friend who’s always willing to help but has no sense of organization. It’ll hold onto everything for you, but finding it later? That’s your problem.

The Moment Everything Changed

I hit my breaking point during a client call. “Just give me one second,” I said, feeling my face heat up as I clicked through nested folders, each one promising to contain the file I needed. None of them did. The file was actually in my Drive’s root folder, with a name that made perfect sense three months ago but now looked like alphabet soup.