Digital journaling is one of those things that can get overwhelming fast because, unlike having one physical journal, there are a million services nudging you to usetheirapp in particular. Before you know it, your daily notes and entries get dispersed across all of them, and journaling starts to have the opposite effect of its intended purpose. Since I gravitate toward any productivity-type app that promises to transform my life, I’ve tried them all and ended up with this same mess.
But I always keep a few staples in my corner to fall back on when things get messy. Apple Notes and Windows Notepad, the most basic options there are - they’re dependable, but they don’t do much beyond letting you type. So Istarted bringing NotebookLM into the mix. It nails the perfect balance between simplicity while still being smart enough to let you interact with your notes. While I’ve primarily been using NotebookLM for my work and studies this year, weaving it into more personal areas of your life seems to have proven beneficial to many.
5 NotebookLM tips I use to supercharge my productivity
Enjoy efficient knowledge management
Why use an AI research tool for journaling?
Journaling is more than just writing things down
NotebookLM can help us make better sense of things, such aslearning how to use new software orunderstanding YouTube content better. Journaling is basically the same thing - raw information that needs perspective - the only difference between that and research is the themes of discussion. Beyond getting better insights into your own life, using NotebookLM as a journal has practical purposes too, including:
- Reminding yourself of the dates of past events. Or reminders of anything, really.
- Prepping for future appointments using past information, like what to bring up with your doctor.
- Creating content from half-formed ideas.
Until NotebookLM, I never believed AI could be this game-changing for productivity
It transformed my view of AI, for the better.
Setting up NotebookLM as a journal
There are a couple of methods
Depending on where you note down your journal entries, adding them to NotebookLM should be straightforward. Windows Notepad is part ofmy local plain text stack, so getting those files into NotebookLM is as simple as saving to a local folder synced to my Google Drive, then retrieving them from my Drive within a notebook. Getting content from Apple Notes into NotebookLM is also straightforward - I just copy the text into the mobile app. Or, if you want a backup copy, you can export Apple Notes as plain txt files to the Files app, share them to the mobile Drive app, and retrieve them from NotebookLM. Basically, as long as you haveGoogle Drive, you can pretty much sync anything from anywhere.
There’s another option: writing the content directly in NotebookLM. Adding every single thought or idea as an individual source will gobble up your source limit pretty quickly, so I use theNotesfunction instead. I create a new note for every new day, like I would a page in a physical journal, with the date as the note title. Then I just type out whatever I would normally write in a journal - feelings, thoughts, ideas, accomplishments, and so on. At the end of every day, I hit “Convert to Source”, so the whole day becomes its own source.
Here, I have about a week’s worth of entries, which is enough to start prompting NotebookLM and actually interact with them. Of course, the problem is the source limit. I haven’t done this for long enough to reach the limit yet, but what I plan on doing is merging all my daily entries into an individual document at the end of each month. After a year, I’ll still be within the limit. Merging your sources is one of mytop tricks for circumventing the limit, and each source allows up to 500,000 words, which is plenty.
I set up a daily log using NotebookLM and Google Calendar — here's how
Hands down, the best thing I’ve done with NotebookLM so far.
Using NotebookLM to interact with my journal entries
Putting the AI to use
There's no use in storing your notes in NotebookLM if you’re not going to interact with them - NotebookLM isn’t an archiving app. You can use any method you want to get insights, additional context, different perspectives, timeline overviews, and whatever else you need. For the visual thinkers, I recommend starting with generating amind map. For those who love audiobook formats, generate anaudio overview. Both give you a basic overview of your entries.
But the most use you’ll get out of NotebookLM is with prompts. I like to get more tactical - highlight habits that correlate with productive or unproductive days, identify emotional triggers, flesh out throw-away ideas, things like that. Here are some of the prompts I’ve been using:
- Based on the selected journal entries, what recurring habits or behaviors seem to correlate with productive vs. unproductive days?
- Highlight patterns of decision-making that led to positive outcomes and those that led to frustration.
- Summarize the most common emotions experienced throughout these journal entries, and the contexts they appear in.
- What action items or reminders appear in the past week’s entries that I should follow up on?
- Based on the selected journal entries, what questions should I bring up at my next [appointment]?
- Scan the selected journal entries for half-formed ideas I could expand on.
- What are two conflicting ideas or viewpoints within the selected sources?
Another thing I recommend doing is customizing NotebookLM’s responses via Custom mode (go to thesettings icon in the top-right, hitCustom, and add your instructions in the text box). I instructed the AI to act as a reflective journal companion and to speak in my own tone - kind of like having anAI version of myself.
I made these NotebookLM mistakes so that you don’t have to
Saving you from NotebookLM headaches
A better way to journal
Many experts recommend daily journaling for health purposes - just the act of writing something down or typing it out can alleviate distress or help you gain clarity. But what you do with your entries after the fact is also important. And having a tool that speed runs and streamlines the processing of my entries made journaling tenfold more useful, and actually fun, too.
