By turning NotebookLM into an auto-summarizing system, I stopped drowning in information and started actually retaining it
I never thought an AI tool would help me understand my own week better, but this setup felt like having a personal editor. NotebookLM, Google’s experimental AI note-taking tool, isn’t marketed as a newsletter generator, but that’s exactly what I’ve turned it into.
By feeding it everything I consumed during the week (think: podcasts, articles, meeting notes, even random Twitter threads), it produces weekly summaries that actually surface insights I’d otherwise miss. It’s like having someone read your brain’s browser history and tell you what actually mattered.
Why your brain needs a weekly recap
Information overload is the real productivity killer
We consume dozens of articles, sit through countless meetings, and bookmark podcasts we swear we’ll revisit. Then Friday hits, and you can barely remember what you learned on Monday. NotebookLM solves this by creating a single source of truth for everything you’ve absorbed. Instead of letting valuable insights evaporate, you’re building a personal knowledge base that compounds over time.
The beauty is in NotebookLM’s source flexibility. It accepts PDFs, Google Docs, text files, web URLs, YouTube links, and even audio files. This means your morning podcast, that afternoon Slack conversation you copied into a doc, and the three articles you saved from Hacker News can all live in one notebook. By Sunday, you won’t be scrambling to remember what resonated. You’re just reviewing a curated digest.
Setting up your weekly notebook workflow
It takes five minutes and zero technical skill
Create a new notebook every Monday morning. Name it by the week, such as «Week of Jan 12-18», which works perfectly. Throughout the week, dump everything worth remembering into it. Read a productivity article? Paste the URL.
