This week, OpenAI added Google Drive to your ChatGPT Library. You could already connect to Google Drive, but now it means you can select a whole Drive folder and ask ChatGPT to look for answers working across all the files it contains.
This can save a lot of time compared to uploading each file individually to ChatGPT’s library and asking ChatGPT to work with it, especially for working with images. Now they’re effectively all in there already.
Now, I don’t know if you’re anything like me, but I tend to treat the root folder of my Google Drive like a very messy desktop. I’ve had my Google account for years, and I just chuck files in there without really organizing them into folders unless I really have to.
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The result is that it has built up into one big mess of old and new files floating about in a kind of digital soup. I’m sure there are important things in there that I’m at risk of forgetting about forever.
So, when I heard that ChatGPT can now look at the documents your Drive folder contains and organize them for you too, I was intrigued.
10 years of junk
To test this out, I thought I’d ask ChatGPT to connect to my Google Drive and take a look at what it could find:
“I’ve got a load of files in my Google Drive that aren’t in folders — go through everything here and identify things I’ve forgotten, unfinished tasks, contradictions, deadlines, duplicate work and anything that looks like it still needs action. Also suggest how it could be organized and what files should go where.”
The result was impressive. It thought for what felt like about 30 seconds, then came back with some results. I had to re-authorize it to connect to my Drive a couple of times first, but everything went smoothly.
It turns out that I have a real penchant for saving files called “Untitled document” into Drive. Chat was able to go through them all and work out what they were about and what was important.
It found a lot of material from various books I’d been writing and suggested how to organize them together. Old invoices were also collected, and there were a lot of forgotten idea fragments that it thought were worth reviewing.
It also found duplicate files and multiple versions of “household_budget_tracker”. Sadly, I never got that project off the ground!
A better structure
The whole process led me to discover things from the last 10 years that I’d pretty much forgotten about, and Chat suggested a folder structure for me to use to keep them more organized. Its ability to spot half-finished ideas and documents from years ago was incredibly useful. In particular, it found the outline of a book I’d started in 2018 and hadn’t thought about for years. I’ve actually started looking at a few of those old writing projects again because of it.
But analyzing the mess and proposing a structure isn’t the only trick ChatGPT can do. I discovered it could actually make those changes itself. Just tell ChatGPT to create a new folder and put a load of files into it, and it will actually do it. So, for example, I asked, “Can you make a folder called Invoices and put all my invoices in there?” All this was possible from within ChatGPT, and I didn’t even need to touch Google Drive myself.
Sadly, the new features aren’t available to ChatGPT Free or Go users. You’ll need a Plus, Pro, or Business account. Another new feature is that it can keep Docs, Sheets, and Slides from your Drive open alongside the conversation while you interrogate them, but today I was more interested in how ChatGPT could help me organize the mess that is my Google Drive.
Seeing ChatGPT casually surface abandoned writing projects from years ago was a slightly strange experience, but I finally feel like I’ve cleaned out my digital junk drawer and got a handle on 10 years of clutter. Perhaps the most useful thing ChatGPT did wasn’t organizing my Google Drive. It made the fact that I hadn’t organized it properly for the last decade matter a lot less.
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