I can't find things quickly in Emacs

My wife called from the gym and wanted to know which plumber we'd called to replace our water heater. The work was done in 2021 so I was pretty sure I'd find it in Emacs/Orgmode. Probably in a Denote note. After about 45 seconds of looking, I got so tangled up in unwanted windows and buffers and minibuffers and missed key bindings that I ended up punting and using Spotlight, which only got me close. This is not the first time this has happened to me when I needed some tidbit of information quickly. The whole situation has upset me to the point of putting me back on the get-out-of-emacs train.