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Hey friend,
Your Downloads folder is a graveyard. Mine was too. A few hundred files, half of them named "document(4).pdf," installers for apps you uninstalled two years ago, screenshots you will never open again.
You have tried Hazel. You wrote four rules, got bored, and the folder filled right back up. I have a better setup now, and the difference is that it actually reads your files instead of sorting them by extension.
It runs on Claude Cowork, the desktop app, on a schedule. Set it up once, then forget the folder exists.
Why does this beat a rules engine?
A normal sorter dumps everything ending in .pdf into a PDF folder. Useless, because now you have 80 files all named "document.pdf" in one place. Cowork opens each file, recognizes it is an invoice from May, and renames it to Acme-Invoice-2026-05.pdf before filing it. It sorts by the file's actual type, not just its extension. No rule can do that
The setup, start to finish
Open Cowork and give it access to your Downloads folder
Run the prompt below once, manually, and watch what it does
When you are happy, type /schedule in the chat and set it to run weekly
Here is the prompt. Paste it as is, then bend the categories to your life.
Sort my Downloads folder. For each file, read enough to understand what it is, then move it into a subfolder by type: Documents, Images, Screenshots, Installers, Archives, PDFs, Spreadsheets. Rename anything with a junk name like "document(3)" to a clear, descriptive name based on its actual contents and date. Move any file untouched for more than 30 days into a folder called "Archive - review me." Never delete anything. When you finish, write a short summary of what you moved, renamed, and archived into a file called Cleanup-Log.md.
The "never delete" line is doing real work. It moves; it does not destroy, so a misfire costs you a drag-and-drop, not a file.
Then put it on autopilot
Type /schedule, pick weekly. I run mine on Friday at 6 PM, so the weekend starts clean. Each run spins up its own fresh session with full folder access and drops a new log so you see exactly what it touched.
One catch. Cowork scheduled tasks fire only when your computer is awake, and the app is open. If your Mac is asleep when the task is due, it runs the next time you wake the machine and tells you it did. So pick a time your Mac is usually on.
The honest version
Read the log for the first two or three runs. You are teaching it to your filing logic in plain English, and you will tweak the categories once or twice. After that, I stopped checking.
Set it up tonight. Reply and tell me how cursed your Downloads folder used to be. I want numbers.
Raja
P.S. Today's setup is one workflow from my Cowork guide. There are 19 more inside, plus the scheduling system that runs them all hands-free. It normally starts at $59. For the next 7 days, subscribers can grab it for $49. Get it from the link below.
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