There's a sort of general rule of thumb that you need to keep between 15-20Gbs of free space on your Mac, this is to allow the system to do its housekeeping, the system is constantly writing and rewriting files and moving them around the disk, so this is why you are getting the warning to free up space.
Files that tend to take up the most space are Movies, Images and Music, so if you can offload some of them that are not needed on a daily basis move them onto an external drive, and delete them from your Mac. If you continue to fill up your drive then your Mac could lock up, which may need a clean install which would mean you could lose your important data.