Look at the subjects / characteristics of your personal data.
Let's say you have your bank stuff:
Bank/BalanceImage.jpg
Okay, I'm missing some details in it, let's add them in and categorize it further:
Personal/Finance/Bank/2012/April/BalanceImage.jpg
Now we're getting somewhere. The only thing left to do is putting it in the right order.
Here are some questions to ask yourself for this case:
Do you separate everything by Personal and Work?
Do you have other Finance sub folders?
Do you like to keep things by date? How much does this help you look something up?
Does the month matter?
Let's say Bank is the only Finance folder and that you have no Business Finance to manage, dates aren't really important. So, this could strip it down to:
Finance/2012/BalanceImage.jpg
But this could as well been:
Work/2012/Finance/Bank/April/BalanceImage.jpg
As you can see, their is no single solution I could take out of a magic bag and give it to you. You have to think this through if you want to get organized, so here are some tips to remember:
Think about a way to categorize your file.
Think about a way to turn characteristics (like the date) into the folder structure.
Ask yourself questions about the folder structure.
Reorganize the folder structure to allow you to look up stuff (in its context) quickly, such that you don't have to search other folders when you simply want relevant files.
If you find yourself changing structure a lot, you might like a system like Tabbles instead.