My Documents

Receipts, letters, contracts and forms in one Drive folder, filed and findable.

What you get

Everybody has this folder. A few hundred PDFs with names like scan_0042.pdf, the lease somewhere in there, and no way to find anything except opening files one at a time.

What is in here is one line per document: what it is, who it is from, what date it carries, and what it is called on disk. Written fresh every evening, so a thing you scanned today is in it tomorrow morning. It turns "somewhere in Drive" into a list you can read.

Coming up is the short page nobody keeps: what expires, what renews, what has a deadline. Written on the first of the month from the dates inside your own documents, not from a calendar you have to fill in.

Then you can just ask. "Where is my lease?" "Find the receipt for the laptop." "What did the insurance letter actually say?" The answer names the file and tells you what is in it.

How to look at it

The Drive folder sits in the sidebar of this cabinet. Open it and you are looking at your real documents, the same ones the Drive app keeps on this computer. Nothing is copied anywhere and nothing is renamed.

What is in here and Coming up are pages in this cabinet. They come pre-filled with made-up documents so you can see the shape straight away. Both say clearly that the documents are invented. Your first real run replaces them.

This is your paperwork

Two things worth knowing before you point this at a folder of your own.

Your documents stay where they are. This cabinet reads them off the Drive app on this computer and writes two pages of its own. It never renames a file, never moves one into a folder it thinks is tidier, and never deletes anything.

Your documents are read by the assistant this cabinet runs on, which for most people means a model running through your own account. If a folder holds something you would not want read at all, point this at a different folder. A separate "Papers" folder in Drive with the personal documents in it, and the rest left out, is a perfectly good answer.

Before it can read your real folder

Connect Google Drive when Cabinet asks, or later from Integrations, and pick the folder your documents are in. You do it once. It uses the Google Drive app on this computer, so nothing new gets installed and nothing is uploaded anywhere.

Until you connect a folder, both pages keep showing the example and the two routines wait.

If the pages still show the example

The routines only write when they can actually read a folder. If one has run and the example is still sitting there, no Drive folder is in this cabinet yet. Nothing was overwritten and nothing errored. Add the folder and run it again.

What is inside

• Filing Clerk, the one person. Reads every document, keeps both pages.
• File New Documents, every evening at 20:00. Monthly Paperwork Check, on the first of the month.
• What is in here and Coming up, the two pages above.