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Mahnoor is a News Writer at XDA who has been in the professional writing game since her sophomore year of high school. While pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, she also has bylines esteemed publications like XDA’s sister site, MakeUseOf, SlashGear, Laptop Mag, and Android Police.

Whether she’s spending hours debugging code or staying up all night to watch a tech event, Mahnoor’s passion for technology is undeniable. She loves writing about all things tech, with a particular focus on iOS and macOS.

While my productivity stack has changed massively this year and many tools have rotated in and out of my workflow, NotebookLM has been the one constant. I’ve used it for all sorts of things, including cramming for finals, learning new skills (both technical skills like programming and random life skills like baking the perfect tiramisu), and simply turning chaotic information into something I can actually work with.

Given how extensively I rely on NotebookLM, I’ve been trying to replace other tools in my workflow with it wherever possible. And for the most part, I’ve been successful — NotebookLM has managed to replace my calendar scheduling app, my finance tracker, and a bunch of other apps.

Unfortunately, while NotebookLM is great at what it does and an incredible replacement for many apps, the one thing it absolutely can’t replace is the kind of dependable knowledge base I initially hoped it would be.

NotebookLM is far from a full personal knowledge system

Not a substitute for a proper PKM

A lot of my colleagues and friends currently use NotebookLM as a replacement for a Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system like Notion and Obsidian. While I’ve tried to do the same, I’ve found that, while NotebookLM works great for spotting connections between documents, it falls short when it comes to serving as a full-fledged PKM system. Personal knowledge management systems are designed to help you keep track of multiple, typically interlinked documents.

They serve as long-term repositories of information and are intended to help you organize and revisit your knowledge over time. While NotebookLM’s Mind Map feature and the functionality to ask questions about your documents and get source-grounded responses are excellent ways to see how multiple documents you upload connect, the problem is that it doesn’t provide the continuity a dedicated PKM system offers.

Every notebook you create in NotebookLM is independent, meaning your knowledge doesn’t accumulate across notebooks. The notebooks you create can’t interact with one another, meaning it’s practically impossible to connect ideas across different domains without putting in a lot of manual work.

Unlike a traditional PKM, NotebookLM offers no persistent structure linking all your information together over time. This means you’ll need to have all the documents you’d like to explore in one notebook every time you want to explore connections. So, at its current stage, you can’t meaningfully use NotebookLM to accumulate knowledge or build a persistent, interconnected knowledge base.

NotebookLM excels at project-based work

Struggles with long-term organization

Given that NotebookLM isn’t the best for building a long-term knowledge base, it performs best in project-based workflows where you need to work with a defined set of documents. It’s perfect for situations where you can drop in all your relevant documents into a single notebook.

For instance, say you’re working on a marketing report and have over fifty documents you’re working with. Manually going through each document and then finding connections across them is something that’d take hours, if not days. With NotebookLM, this is something you can complete within minutes.

Once your documents are uploaded, you can use the tool to instantly see links, extract insights, and get source-grounded answers across all your documents. But the thing is, once you’ve wrapped up the work, your notebook essentially expires in terms of ongoing utility.

The knowledge doesn’t persist beyond that project, and there’s no quick way to carry over insights into a new notebook or workflow. It is excellent for processing information, but poor for storing it long-term in a way that remains retrievable and useful once you’ve wrapped up the project.

NotebookLM isn’t meant for note-taking

Falls short as a writing and reflection space

While a PKM is meant to help you organize and retrieve information you store, they all also ship with a solid writing environment. They’re designed to be places where you do all your thinking. NotebookLM, though, is the opposite of a note-taking app. As mentioned above, NotebookLM is primarily designed to be a platform for processing and exploring updated information instead of writing and reflecting.

While it does have a Notes feature that lets you make quick notes and jot down ideas, it isn’t meant to replace a full-fledged note-taking or writing environment. The text editing capabilities are barebones compared to the rich text or markdown environments you’ll find in dedicated tools. So, NotebookLM is in no way meant to serve as a primary writing tool and ultimately, it fails at offering the flexibility you’d get with a PKM.

Combining NotebookLM with a traditional knowledge system works better

Complementing a dedicated knowledge system

Instead of using NotebookLM as a replacement for a PKM, I prefer using it alongside one. For instance, I currently use Notion as my PKM, and I pair it with NotebookLM. Depending on the PKM you use, there’s typically some manual work required on your end to make the combination work smoothly.

Related

For example, with Notion, I use its web clipper extension to gather all the relevant pages and export them to a location I can upload into NotebookLM. I then use Notion as my long-term repository for notes, ideas, and structured information.

Since NotebookLM also lacks organizational features currently, I link the relevant NotebookLM notebooks in my corresponding Notion pages, which allows me to quickly jump back and forth between my analysis in NotebookLM and my structured notes in Notion.

NotebookLM isn’t meant to be a PKM

At the end of the day, NotebookLM is an AI-powered research assistant. It’s designed to make working with your own resources easier. It isn’t meant to replace your PKM, and it’s unreasonable to expect it to.