That headline, honestly! It sounds like something out of one of those magazines — How I escaped a loveless marriage; How I gave up being an Only Fans bestseller; How I made a fortune without writing a word….
But now let’s be serious. I was recently commissioned to write a blog post for an organisation. They gave me loads of stuff in different formats to draw on: survey results in the form of an Excel spreadsheet; policy documents in PDF form; website pages; even a chart. I decided that flipping from one to another would drive me nuts, and probably wouldn’t help me see the wood for the trees. So I threw the whole lot into a NotebookLM project, and that yielded three advantages:
Firstly, I had everything I needed in one place. It’s a bit like the Swiss army knife that Microsoft’s OneNote set out to be, although I never really liked it much, and still don’t.
Secondly, however I made use of the material, and nothing else, no inadvertent plagiarism was involved.
Thirdly, the program suggested a number of avenues of enquiry and was able to suggest links and create summaries which I may have (probably would have) missed. Mind you, I do have a slight doubt about this last one. It reminds me of the small qualms I have when manipulating an Excel pivot table. It shows up relationships you might never have detected, but how “real” those relationships are is often a source of doubt. You know, the old causation vs correlation thing.
Once I ran a few of those queries and saved the resulting Notes, I was able to write the blog post very quickly. To be honest, I’m a fast writer as it is, but using NotebookLM helped me to be even faster.
This article was originally published in my newsletter, Digital Education, which is free. If you would like to read the blog posts I was referring to, you will find them here: