1. Links and Recalling Information

So, suppose we've got information in:

  • Journal/2024/10/October 2024
  • Journal/2024/10/NYACC Presentation
  • Person/Asa Bacon
  • Activity/NYACC

Will we be able to quickly navigate from any given piece of data to all the other pages that have relevant additional details?

Of course, being an electronic notebook program, Obsidian can easily find information by page names and by full-text-searching the content of your vault.

  • Find a page
    Ctrl+O → type some partial keywords until the right name comes up.
  • Find words anywhere in the vault
    Ctrl+Shift+F "Search"
  • Show all tags
    Ctrl+P , Tags view: Show tags
  • Find pages which include a tag
    Ctrl+Shift+F then enter "tag:" followed the tag name, for example "tag:#overdue".
    or click a tag name found in the body of a page to perform that same search.

Obsidian keeps track of hyperlinks in both directions, not just one direction from the hyperlink to its target.

The built-in Backlinks plugin shows all of the pages that link to the current page in a convenient sidebar widget.

Backlinks in the page footer

By default, Backlinks appear in the right sidebar (Ctrl+P , Toggle right sidebar).

My personal preference is to turn on this setting:
⚙ → Backlinks → Show backlinks at the bottom of notes

Then I always see backlinks in the page edit frame, even if I have the right sidebar turned off.

So now, the Activity folder ends up being a hub for every project.

Here we see an outgoing link to Asa from the Contact property, and an incoming link from my journal page about NYACC presentation (this presentation).

1. 4. Links and Recalling Information-20241010174032809.webp

It follows that if we were currently viewing the NYACC Presentation page and wanted to know who's the Contact for this Activity, we just need to follow a couple of hyperlinks, and we're there. You can see this Ctrl+G Graph view.

1. 4. Links and Recalling Information-20241010174741590.webp