Great list, Dan. Very similar to my own daily use, but surprised you’re not using NotebookLM more.
I only realised it had rolled out in the UK thanks to the publicity around its slightly gimmicky podcast creation feature, but have found its core functionality incredibly useful. You can upload mountains of project docs or notes and interrogate them using natural language. E.g. “what’s the link to that Miro board we made at the start of the year to sort out that crisis?” I use it to consolidate all of my notes about something in one place, then give the output to Claude or ChatGPT for brainstorming (Gemini, which powers NotebookLM, is fine for retrieving info, but still lags far behind when turning it into something new).
Thanks David. Have been wondering about transitioning to NotebookLM as my primary note-taking app but feel a bit wary about going all-in having experienced the enshittification of Evernote. Also mindful of Google’s track record of sunsetting products (https://killedbygoogle.com/). Are you now using NotebookLM as your primary note-taking app or making the notes elsewhere and importing them?
The name is a misnomer: you can’t actually create notes in NotebookLM 🤷♂️ It just uses 'notebook' to mean a folder of large docs. I ditched Evernote, Notion, and Obsidian years ago for IA Writer, so had my notes as a stash of large text files. I also asked it to list the rudest things I’ve said on Whatsapp since 2017 (you can export your chat history), which did not make me feel good about myself. It's well worth playing around with.
Great list, Dan. Very similar to my own daily use, but surprised you’re not using NotebookLM more.
I only realised it had rolled out in the UK thanks to the publicity around its slightly gimmicky podcast creation feature, but have found its core functionality incredibly useful. You can upload mountains of project docs or notes and interrogate them using natural language. E.g. “what’s the link to that Miro board we made at the start of the year to sort out that crisis?” I use it to consolidate all of my notes about something in one place, then give the output to Claude or ChatGPT for brainstorming (Gemini, which powers NotebookLM, is fine for retrieving info, but still lags far behind when turning it into something new).
Thanks David. Have been wondering about transitioning to NotebookLM as my primary note-taking app but feel a bit wary about going all-in having experienced the enshittification of Evernote. Also mindful of Google’s track record of sunsetting products (https://killedbygoogle.com/). Are you now using NotebookLM as your primary note-taking app or making the notes elsewhere and importing them?
The name is a misnomer: you can’t actually create notes in NotebookLM 🤷♂️ It just uses 'notebook' to mean a folder of large docs. I ditched Evernote, Notion, and Obsidian years ago for IA Writer, so had my notes as a stash of large text files. I also asked it to list the rudest things I’ve said on Whatsapp since 2017 (you can export your chat history), which did not make me feel good about myself. It's well worth playing around with.
As always, really clear. Does anyone else offer this kind of detailed comparative analysis?