When you create a link on a webpage, it goes one direction. Page A links to Page B, but Page B has no idea Page A exists. That's fine for the web, but it's a problem for your notes.
Bidirectional links work differently. When you connect two things, both sides know about the connection. Link a note to a project, and that project automatically shows the note that references it.
This small difference changes everything about how you organize information.
The problem with one-way links
Imagine you're researching a new laptop. You create a note with your requirements, another with reviews you've read, another with price comparisons. You link them all to a page called "Laptop Research."
With regular one-way links, your Laptop Research page is just a list of links you manually created. If you write something relevant in another note—maybe a comment about your budget, or a recommendation from a friend—it won't show up unless you remember to go back and add the link.
You have to do all the organizational work yourself, and you have to remember to do it every time.
How bidirectional links help
With bidirectional links, you mention @note:Laptop Research in any note, and it automatically appears on your Laptop Research page. You don't have to maintain a list. The list builds itself from every mention across all your notes.
That friend's recommendation you jotted down last week? It shows up. The budget constraints you wrote about in your financial planning note? They show up too. Every relevant thought surfaces in one place, even if you wrote it somewhere else entirely.
You stop asking "where did I put that?" and start asking "what do I know about this?"
Connections you didn't plan for
The real power shows up over time. As your notes grow, bidirectional links reveal connections you never explicitly made.
You might notice that a certain person keeps showing up in notes about a particular topic—maybe they're a good resource you should reach out to. You might see patterns in your thinking, clusters of ideas that belong together but live in different places.
These emergent connections are impossible with one-way links. They only happen when every reference is tracked from both sides.
An example
Say you're managing a home renovation. You have pages for different rooms, contractors, budget, and timeline. As you take notes over weeks and months, you mention these things wherever relevant.
When a question comes up about the kitchen contractor, you open their page and see everything: the initial quote, the conversation about tile options, the delay they mentioned, the payment schedule. You didn't organize this—you just mentioned them when writing, and the links did the rest.
Now compare that to searching through a folder of documents, trying to remember which file has the information you need.
The shift in thinking
Bidirectional links change your relationship with note-taking. You stop worrying about the "right" place to put things because everything is findable through its connections.
You write more freely because you're not interrupting your thoughts to file things properly. You trust that the connections you make—even casually—will surface when you need them.
Your notes become a network instead of a filing cabinet. And networks are much better at helping you think.