This, and it's something baked into Spacemacs (easy to replicate with a vanilla Emacs, thought): working within a projectile-initialized folder, hitting <leader

This, and it's something baked into Spacemacs (easy to replicate with a vanilla Emacs, thought): working within a projectile-initialized folder, hitting <leader>po will open a TODO.org at the root folder of your project, where you can write anything you want (including inserting an Org-mode link to the file/line you were editing), and save/switch back to your file in a handful of keystrokes. Downside: you end up with too much notes.