Downloads Triage Skill

The Downloads folder is where files land, not where they live — but without a triage habit it becomes the household junk drawer: installers from 2023, seventeen copies of the same logo, that PDF you needed once. The rescue is bulk-first: age and type rules dispose of 80% without item-by-item decisions ("installers older than a month: delete all"), the keepers get filed by the folder rules, and a ten-minute weekly sweep keeps the count near zero forever.

What This Skill Produces

• The bulk rules — age × type classes that clear most of the pile in a few decisions
• The four buckets — delete / file (with destinations) / action (it's really a task) / quarantine (unsure, dated, auto-expiring)
• The safe-delete classes — what's always safe (installers, re-downloadables) and the two check-first classes
• The sweep habit — the weekly ten-minute pass, plus the browser setting that helps

Required Inputs

Ask for these if not provided:

• The scale and vintage — item count and oldest file; a 200-item month and a 4,000-item three-years get different opening moves
• The filing destinations — where keepers go (the folder-structure-designer structure if one exists; the _inbox if not)
• Known treasures — anything important currently living in Downloads (tax documents in the junk drawer is common and worth asking about explicitly)

Framework: The Bulk-First Rules