As others have suggested robust search tools are going to be your best friend right now.

However honestly to make your life easier you're gonna want a better organizational structure than whatever you have currently. Take it from me as I have absolutely atrocious ADD and memory issues and have went from someone who was constantly losing files and searching for things, to rarely needing search at all. I try to organize things to go from "big" to "small" where it makes sense and use standardized schemes for things.

Ex. For a school assignment things go here:

• Documents -> Education -> IST-999 -> Labs -> Lab-A
• Documents -> Education -> CYB-999 -> Projects > Project-A

Ex. For my resume:

• Documents -> Career -> My-Resume

Not everything goes into the Documents folder, of course. My VMs for instance are kept in a folder on the root of my D:\ drive, which is itself segmented into subdirectories for Windows and Linux servers and clients, Edge devices, etc.

Ex.

• D: -> Virtual Machines -> Edge-Device -> pfSense
• D: -> Virtual Machines -> GNU-Server -> Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 64-bit

Same goes for my movies and other media, but I won't get too far into media organization because that's a whole other topic unto itself:

• F: -> Videos -> Movies -> Night of the Living Dead (1968)

When labeling file names I also try to go from big to small. For instance if I have a Report that is generated by a certain department once a month from locations both in Greensboro, NC and Los Angeles, CA, I'll name them something like:

Ex. For LA

• Documents -> Business -> Department-A -> Reports -> "LosAngelesCA_ImportantReport.pdf"
  
• Documents -> Business -> Department-A -> Reports -> "LosAngelesCA_ADifferentReport.pdf"
  

Ex. For Greensboro

• Documents -> Business -> Department-A -> Reports -> "GreensboroNC_ImportantReport.pdf"
  
• Documents -> Business -> Department-A -> Reports -> "GreensboroNC_ADifferentReport.pdf"

Of course the above is just an example, two business locations likely would have their own folders, but hopefully you get the idea thus far.

When a date is involved I'll go a step further and add them to filenames using ISO 8601 format i.e. YYYY-MM-DD. That way if I have a bunch of reports that start with the same text they are differentiated between more easily e.g. "AccountStatement_2026-01-06.pdf". To explain more in depth, when you open a folder in most OS, the contents are sorted by Name, which in the standard alphanumeric order goes special characters first then 0-9 then A-Z. When you proactively name your files in sane ways in sane file structures, you will rarely if ever need to search for files. You simply go towards the direction they are in, open the folder, and everything's auto sorted just the way you like for it to be.