Google’s NotebookLM is many things. It’s not just a study buddy for stressed-out students or a research assistant for academics. It’s surprisingly flexible, and honestly, half the fun is figuring out creative ways to use it.

Beyond college work, I’ve used NotebookLM as a fitness coach, a coffee expert to teach me how to brew better coffee, a playlist curator, and more. But there’s one thing it absolutely isn’t, and people keep treating it like it is: a note-taking app.

I don’t blame people for thinking that — its name, after all, includes “Notebook,” which naturally makes you assume it’s for taking notes. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

At its core, NotebookLM is a research assistant

Not a note-taking tool

Note-taking apps are tools that have dedicated spaces for you to capture thoughts, organize ideas, and build a long-term knowledge base. You open a note-taking app, and you’ll always find a blank page waiting for you to jot things down, plan, or dump whatever’s on your mind.

They’re built around the act of writing and organizing (more on that below). NotebookLM isn’t. If you search for NotebookLM on Google, the very first result is the tool itself, and you’ll notice the company describes it as an AI Research Tool and Thinking Partner.

And that’s exactly what NotebookLM is meant to be — a tool that helps you think smarter and save time while researching. NotebookLM only works if you feed it information. It’s designed to reference sources you upload to it, and then help you interact with them. It doesn’t greet you with an empty page to begin brainstorming or note-taking.

Instead, it waits for you to bring in information you’ve already compiled, so it can help you understand and build on it. For instance, once you’ve uploaded a source (or multiple), you can convert them into an engaging podcast (called Audio Overview), a short explanatory video, a mind map, or even an organized report.

All of these can help you create notes, or you can structure your notes around the insights NotebookLM gives you. But notice the order there. You don’t start in NotebookLM. You start somewhere else, gather your material, then bring it in for deeper processing. So, while NotebookLM’s outputs, like reports and summaries, are certainly substitutes for notes, they still come after the information-gathering step (which is what you typically do in an actual note-taking app).

NotebookLM has absolutely no organization system

It’s pure chaos

The entire reason why note-taking apps are so useful is that they give you a way to structure, categorize, and retrieve your ideas over time. They’re designed specifically for users to capture and organize information, and have structures like folders, tags, and notebooks to help you actually store and shape your ideas over time.

NotebookLM doesn’t have a single one of those features. In fact, this is a complaint I voiced in one of my first ever NotebookLM articles back in April. Whenever you want to use NotebookLM, you need to create a new notebook or open an existing one. Notebooks are where you add your sources, and they’re the only form of organization the tool provides. While it sounds like a folder, it doesn’t function like one in any meaningful way.

You have to manually decide what goes into each notebook, and there’s no system for tagging, sorting, or linking content across notebooks. Sure, you can organize entire projects within one notebook (like a folder in any other app), but there’s not much beyond it. You can’t create sub-folders to even organize the sources you upload.

So, your only options are either dumping everything in one notebook or creating multiple notebooks and manually keeping track of what goes where. For example, I have separate notebooks for each of my courses. And sometimes, there’s a topic in a course that’s not linked to what we’ve previously covered in it, and I have to create a separate notebook just for it. That’s one more thing I need to manually keep track of.

And given that you need to create a notebook to use any NotebookLM feature, keeping track of each notebook gets extremely messy very quickly.

If you really want to, you can use it for notes

Only if you really, really, really want to

That said, if you really, really want to have your research and notes in one place, you can absolutely build a workflow around NotebookLM to make that happen. But keep in mind that it won’t feel as natural as a traditional note-taking app. For instance, I’m a Computer Science major right now, and I have around six courses every semester. I use Notion for all of my note-taking, but if I were to force myself to use NotebookLM for it, I’d create six separate notebooks.

I’d upload all my lecture slides to the relevant notebook, and then utilize the Notes feature to do all my note-taking. It’s a neat feature to jot down any ideas or thoughts you have as you use NotebookLM to explore your thoughts further. Each notebook can have up to 1000 notes, which means you have more than enough space to jot down every idea you get.

While the Notes feature offers basic formatting options like bold, italics, bullet points, and numbered lists, it’s still limited compared to a full-fledged note-taking app like Notion. The organization issue also stands here. There’s no way to create folders or subfolders, add tags, group similar notes, or link them across notebooks. You can capture your ideas, but managing and finding them later will be entirely manual.

I prefer pairing NotebookLM with note-taking apps

Personally, I’m not the biggest fan of this workflow above and choose to pair NotebookLM with my note-taking apps. This way, I can get the best of both worlds and use NotebookLM the way it’s meant to be used. We have a bunch of articles up on XDA that can help you pair NotebookLM with your note-taking app of choice, including Notion, Google Keep, Obsidian, Apple Notes, and more.

NotebookLM is an add-on you can add to your note-taking process by pairing it with a note-taking app. For instance, you can pair NotebookLM with note-taking tools like Notion, Evernote, Apple Notes,.