I have my documents organized by topic, my code repos organized by... well, each folder is a repo in ~/code. Stuff like bills and receipts I don't usually down

I have my documents organized by topic, my code repos organized by... well, each folder is a repo in ~/code. Stuff like bills and receipts I don't usually download, I just keep copies in my email archives and purge old ones once a year or so. I keep everything that's pending review in ~/downloads, even if it's not a download, because my home folder is a bit cluttered with dotfiles and I like to keep hidden files visible. I don't use a desktop folder so this is my equivalent to what many people use their desktops for. My pictures are generally just in folders with a date and meaningful name like "2018-11-FL-Vacation". Music is just all piled into one folder since my car's USB reader can only read from the top-level folder and I mostly download stuff to listen to in the car. By the way, since you mentioned PDFs, a handy tool to use is pdfgrep (https://pdfgrep.org/ https://pdfgrep.org/) to do text searches of PDF documents. I also use the 'locate' command a lot to quickly find files by filename/directory.