A lightweight, continuing practice for keeping note navigation useful. The aim is not maximal linking; it is to make the next relevant note easy to find without filling indexes with noise.
When to do it
- When creating or materially updating a note: add the small number of links a reader will genuinely need next.
- During an end-of-day review after substantial documentation work, or when an index visibly contains repeated or misplaced entries: audit a bounded local area, not the whole corpus.
- When a reader cannot find a note through its natural parent/hub, or when a link seems stale, duplicated, misleading, or merely archival clutter.
Keep, improve, remove
- Keep historical links when they explain a decision, predecessor, superseded implementation, or useful route through the material.
- Add links between a worklog and its ticket, active plan, operational guide, or immediate next-step note when those are distinct destinations.
- Move a useful link to its nearest meaningful section rather than leaving it at the end of a generic index.
- Remove only links or index entries that are broken, exact duplicates, stale/misleading, or add no navigation value. Before removal, check whether the target holds unique information and preserve another route to it if needed.
Safe audit method
- Choose one hub/index and its directly related notes.
- Read the target notes and judge each link by the reader question it answers.
- Make targeted changes with current block IDs; preserve metadata and non-duplicate historical routes.
- Read back the changed area and verify that every moved or new link resolves and that no useful link was accidentally removed.
- Record only reusable curation lessons; do not turn a one-off project relationship into a general rule.
Related: workflow for creating/updating notes, avoiding orphaned notes, and end-of-day review.