A Short, Yet Useful Guide to NotebookLM

My favorite AI learning tool and how to get started.

The Lifelong Learning Club is your place for applying evidence-based learning strategies so you can learn faster, remember what you read, and use AI to augment thinking, instead of outsourcing it.

NotebookLM is the most useful free AI tool I use. This short guide explains how to master it in two phases.

Why I Love NotebookLM (And How it’s Different from ChatGPT)

Unlike Gemini, Claude or ChatGPT, which draw from the entire internet, NotebookLM¹ analyzes only the sources you provide and select. In over six months of heavy use, I haven’t seen it invent facts or confidently drift off-course in the way general-purpose LLMs sometimes do, as it does not pull irrelevant or factually-wrong information from the wider internet.

That said, staying critical and fact-checking matters with every AI tool, and some users have reported occasional hallucinations. So treat it like a sharp research assistant, not an unquestionable authority.²

My Daily Use Cases

I have currently about 10 different Notebooks. I use them to write my book, fact-check Substack notes against learning science, analyze trends in my personal annual reflections over time, and study new subjects.

Unlock NotebookLM’s Power in Two Phases

Here’s how you can unlock its power in two phases.

1) Open a Notebook and Upload Sources

First, open a new NotebookLM and name it for your purpose. Second, upload your sources or paste links. This can be articles, transcripts from online courses or university lectures, chapters of textbooks, links to youtube videos, or Website URLs (it extracts the text), and research papers.

Start with creating a notebook that is really useful for you right now, for example, that helps you handle recurring tasks:

• Lesson & Curriculum Design: Upload curriculum standards, past lesson plans, student feedback, and exemplar assignments. Use NotebookLM to synthesize gaps, align objectives, and generate lesson sequences grounded in your actual materials.

• Literature Reviews: Upload academic papers relevant to your field and use the notebook to synthesize, find consensus across the papers, or identify conflicting methodologies without having to manually tag every citation first.

• Social Media Posts: Upload brand and style guides, tone-of-voice rules, values, high-performing past posts (yours and competitors’), campaign briefs or audience personas, platform-specific constraints (e.g. LinkedIn vs Instagram vs X).

• Podcast Pre-Production: Upload a guest’s book, previous interviews, and biography. Ask NotebookLM to generate interview questions that haven’t been asked before, or to summarize their stance on specific controversial topics so you are prepared to debate them.

screenshot of my notebook LM

Beyond uploading your own files, NotebookLM has a “Discover Sources” feature. You can describe what you want to learn, and it will suggest sources to get you started, for example, you can prompt it to “find sources from reddit threads only.” No other AI tool I’ve used lets you gather such a wide range of materials in one workspace that’s this easy to explore and build on.³

2) Interact and Visualize

Once your sources are ready, use the “Notebook Guide” and “Studio” features to deepen your understanding.

Synthesize with Targeted Instructions

Instead of asking generic questions like “summarize this” use custom instructions and anchor new information to what you already know. This follows the evidence-based principle of elaboration—connecting new ideas to existing ones.

• For Lesson Designers: “Review my past lesson plans and the new curriculum standards. Identify three specific gaps where my current materials don’t meet the new standards, and suggest creative ways to bridge them.”

• For the Lifelong Learner: “Explain these complex research papers on nutrition by comparing the concepts to how a car engine works. Use no jargon in the first paragraph, then introduce technical terms in the second.”

• For Podcast Producers: “Compare the guest’s previous interviews (Source A) with their new book (Source B). What are the three most significant shifts in their perspective over the last year?”

Use Multi-Sensory Studio Tools

NotebookLM’s Studio tab allows you to generate high-quality outputs that help you visualize and hear the information.

• Customized Audio Overviews: Try prompting the audio to be a Debate between two experts on the pros and cons of your topic, or a Beginner Interview where one host asks the simple questions you’re currently stuck on.

• Slide Decks & Infographics: If you like visuals, use the Studio to generate a slide deck. It will pull images and bullet points directly from your sources. For example, you can ask it to generate an infographic summarizing your brand guidelines or a slide deck of “Top 10 Takeaways” from your high-performing past posts to see patterns in what works.

Master Active Recall

While I love that NotebookLM has integrated active recall (with flashcards and quizzes) I am not a big fan of their feature yet. Instead, I recommend you set-up your own spaced repetition system with Anki and follow the best practices for card formulation (I’ll share a NotebookLM you can use to improve your cards in a future post).

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Additional Inspiration

If you’re feeling stuck on where to start, look at how others are using it. Here are a few public notebooks for inspiration:

• Our World in Data: Explore complex global trends in health, wealth, and happiness.

• William Shakespeare: The Complete Plays: Use this to see how NotebookLM handles 45 different literary sources to find themes and patterns in the Bard’s work.

• The Human Genome: A great example of how to break down high-level scientific concepts into digestible explainers.

Your Next Steps

Don’t wait for a perfect project. Pick one topic such as a work report, a hobby you want to master, or a collection of articles you’ve saved but never read. Open a new notebook, upload those files, and ask your first question. I’d be delighted to read about your first win or how you use NotebookLM (additional advice welcome!) in the comment sections.

Thanks to my dear friend Sophie Spitzer, whose questions about NotebookLM sparked this guide.

1. NotebookLM is free and made by Google. I’m not affiliated with Google and receive no compensation for recommending it.

2. In an earlier version of this article I used the term “hallucination - free”, which is wrong. Thanks to Jen who flagged this in the comments.

3. Free accounts have up to 100 notebooks with 50 sources each, plus 10 Deep Research queries a month. Pro accounts, included in the $20/month Google AI Pro plan, raise the cap to 500 notebooks with 300 sources each and allow 20 Deep Research queries a day.