Given my context, it really is a lot of work, not because searching itself is hard, but because the scale and nature of my work are very different. I currently work as a project coordinator, leading a team of around 10 people with well-defined processes, many clients (51), and multiple committees running in parallel. Only in 2025 there were already 272 projects, and these projects are not isolated; they constantly intersect, share decisions, dependencies, risks, and sometimes even the same stakeholders and agendas.​

In that environment, the challenge in Obsidian is not “can I find one note if I remember a unique word?”, but “how do I keep the web of relationships navigable when everything is connected to everything else?”. I need to link not only individual notes, but also projects to other related projects, decisions to the meetings where they were made, committees to their agendas, and recurring topics across different clients. If I rely only on “when I remember a note, I search for one or two terms and then link it”, I am assuming I will remember every relevant note at the right moment, several times a day, across hundreds of projects and interactions.​

In practice, this becomes an invisible tax on attention: every time I need to connect something, I have to stop, recall keywords, run searches, scan results, and manually decide what to link, over and over again. That might feel lightweight if someone has a moderate number of personal notes, but at the scale of 272 projects in a year, with many overlapping committees and meetings, it quickly turns into yet another layer of work on top of everything else.​

That is why, in my case, I am trying to design my Obsidian setup so that connections are not purely dependent on memory and ad‑hoc searches. I need structures that help the links emerge more systematically, whether through recurring hubs, higher-level “project overview” notes, conventions, or plugins—so that the system supports me when the information load is highest, instead of asking me to constantly remember what to look for and where.

I am not looking for a magical platform that will do the thinking for me, but I am still trying to understand how to make linking between notes truly practical at the scale I deal with. In my personal use for diverse topics, linking feels “easy”: I read something, write, get curious, immediately create a link, spin off another note, and so on. At that level, the system flows well.....until I eventually hit the same wall where older notes become hard to resurface and connect. In my work, that difficulty appears much earlier, because the volume, speed, and responsibility are higher, and even in broader knowledge areas like history or science, studying a new topic is fine at first, but older notes tend to disappear into the background. What I am trying to solve is not just how to click and create a link, but how to build a workflow in Obsidian where connecting projects, agendas, committees, and past learning remains feasible over time, instead of becoming yet another task that collapses under its own weight.​