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Setting up and organizing your personal folder

Level: Beginner

Three habits are enough to find any conversation again. This tip explains how to set them up for the long run, with naming examples, a starter folder structure and advice to keep your organization useful over time.

Why organize early

At first, a few conversations are easy to find. After a month of regular use, there are dozens of them, and looking for "the prompt that worked" becomes a real waste of time. Organizing from the start takes five minutes; cleaning up a mess takes much longer.

A well-filed conversation has a second advantage: you can reopen it and continue with all its context, instead of starting from scratch.

Filing your conversations

Moving a conversation into a collection

Depending on the tool, a folder may be called a "collection" or a "project". The principle stays the same: grouping by theme.

A starter structure

Don't look for the perfect organization. Start with three folders and only add more when a theme keeps coming back:

  • Work: your everyday tasks (writing, analyses, meeting preparation).
  • Learning: what you are learning, your trials, your AI Gazette exercises.
  • Personal: anything unrelated to the company.

Stick to two levels. Beyond that, you no longer know where to file things, and you can no longer find them.

Naming things so you can find them

An automatic title such as "Help with an email" is useless three weeks later. Adopt a fixed pattern: theme – topic – date.

Avoid Prefer
Email help Customers – Invoice reminder – 2026-11
Summary Meetings – Committee summary – 2026-12
Ideas Learning – AI workshop plan – 2026-11

Writing the date as year then month sorts the list correctly in alphabetical order.

Keep, archive, delete

Not every conversation has the same value. Once a month, take two minutes to sort:

  • Keep the ones you might reopen: an email template, a method that worked.
  • Archive or rename the ones that are useful but rarely opened.
  • Delete dead-end trials and, above all, exchanges holding information you no longer need.

Deleting is also a security habit: the less content remains, the less data there is to protect.

Keeping a prompt notebook

An instruction that worked well deserves to be kept. In a simple document, write down for each one:

  1. the instruction as you sent it;
  2. the situation where you used it;
  3. the model used and the quality of the result;
  4. one point to improve, if any.

This notebook is the starting point of the prompt library by role.

Confidentiality

A folder does not separate data: all conversations stay in the same account. Do not file confidential or customer data without checking your company's rules, described in the data security and privacy charter and in the tip Data security and privacy.

Common mistakes

  • Creating too many folders from the start, then no longer knowing which ones to use.
  • Leaving automatic titles and no longer finding anything.
  • Keeping everything: a cluttered history makes searching slower.
  • Copying prompts that contain sensitive data into your notebook.

Hands-on exercise (5 minutes)

  1. Open your list of conversations.
  2. Create two folders: one for work and one personal.
  3. Move three conversations into them and rename them with the pattern above.
  4. Note how long it takes you to find one of them the next time you search.