Documents you can actually find
They exist. Finding one takes twenty minutes and three folders. Here is the cheapest fix.
Nobody loses documents. People lose the path to them. The passport scan is somewhere — in mail, in a chat, on an old phone, in a folder named “new folder 2”.
The usual advice is to build a filing system. That advice fails for the same reason every time: a system you have to maintain competes with your actual life, and loses.
One folder beats twelve
Make one place. Put everything in it, unsorted. Resist the urge to build subfolders on day one — you do not yet know which ones you need, and empty folders are a promise you will not keep.
Name files so that you would find them by searching the way you think: not “scan_0012”, but “passport Anna 2031”. The search box is the filing system; file names are what make it work.
What to keep and what to let go
Keep anything that proves something: identity, ownership, a payment, a warranty. Let go of anything you could get again in ten minutes. Most of what clogs a document folder is the second kind.
Where it helps to have a space
Files kept here live outside the app releases and go away with your space when you delete it — not before, and not after. That is written down on the data page, not just promised here.