I’m all about simplifying my workflow, and using as few apps as possible. Even though I’m constantly experimenting with new tools, I always look for ones that can replace multiple apps at once. One tool that I’ve been able to integrate into pretty much every part of my life is NotebookLM. I’ve used it for all sorts of tasks, but one thing I didn’t expect was just how much it would end up replacing some of my go-to apps entirely. Here are three apps in particular that NotebookLM has effectively replaced for me, and why I barely touch them anymore.

Reclaim

Time-blocking is a task that I feel takes a lot of unnecessary time. It’s a simple task that a lot of calendar apps unnecessarily complicate. Given just how many little tasks I have to do every single day and my incessant need to see it all blocked out on my calendar, the time I spend manually doing it every day is significant, and that time could be better spent doing something else. That’s exactly why I’ve turned to an AI-powered calendar scheduling tool, Reclaim, to handle my chaotic calendar.

Reclaim is a tool acquired by Dropbox, and it’s essentially designed to cut down on the amount of time you spend manually scheduling events on your calendar. Reclaim doesn’t simply time-block tasks for you at completely random slots. Instead, it takes your availability into account and considers both the priority and due date of your tasks. If you end up adding a higher-priority task, the tool will go through your already scheduled tasks and reshuffle them to make space for the new one, ensuring you get everything done within the due date.

While Reclaim is great, the tool has a major caveat: it doesn’t really know what time you can focus best.This is where NotebookLM comes in. It’s excellent at analyzing trends from documents you upload, helping you see patterns and priorities that aren’t obvious at first glance. Since I often find myself manually moving the blocks Reclaim schedules to match when I actually focus, my calendar is the best representation of when I focus best.

So, I simply export my calendar data and add it to NotebookLM, and also let it know the tasks I need to get done, along with their due dates and priority. Since NotebookLM can’t really take actions on my behalf, I leave that to an agentic AI browser, which can handle the actual scheduling. Together, the pair has pretty much replaced Reclaim for me.

Quizlet

I’ve always been a very forgetful person. Unfortunately, that isn’t the best quality to have when you have at least a few memorization-heavy courses every semester. I memorize a question’s answer, and then when I memorize the next, I’ve suddenly forgotten the previous one. By the time I reach the end of the content I need to memorize, it hits me that I only remember the last thing I memorized and fragments of the material from the beginning.

The only technique that’s really ever worked for me is creating flashcards, and I’ve relied on Quizlet for it for years. However, if you’ve ever created a flashcard deck before, you know how long it takes to manually make a decent set. You need to have your study material open in one tab, and then spend time typing out each answer and question. Before you can begin typing the content, you also need to figure out how to break the material down into digestible chunks that actually make sense as flashcards.

Thankfully, NotebookLM’s Flashcards feature saves you all that hassle. You can simply upload the material you’d like to create flashcards from, and then hit the Flashcards button in the Studio panel. The tool will automatically begin curating flashcards for you. The best part is how customizable this feature is. When you click the pencil icon on the Flashcards tile, a Customize Flashcards popup appears.

Here, you can pick the number of cards from Fewer, Standard (Default), and More. You can also tweak the level of difficulty by selecting either Easy, Medium, or Hard. Finally, you can add custom instructions and let NotebookLM know if you’d like the flashcards to focus on a specific topic too, which is perfect for the days when you’re struggling with one chapter in particular.

Studying using the flashcards is super fun too. It shows you how many answers you get correct and wrong, along with the percentage of correct answers, so you can track your progress as you go. I’ve saved so much time since NotebookLM launched this feature, and I haven’t opened Quizlet once.

YouTube

I know this sounds like a very weird take, but hear me out. In the last few years, the only time I’ve ever really opened YouTube in the past few years is to watch videos for either work or college. That too, is to watch super lengthy videos to understand confusing concepts, watch an interview, a live product launch, etc. I rarely open YouTube anymore to watch a video for leisure, and often just end up on Netflix or Amazon Prime when I need a break after a long day.

Since I started using NotebookLM, I’ve even started skipping YouTube almost entirely for work or study-related content too, at least the traditional way. Instead of doing so much as opening the video, I simply copy the URL, and paste it into a NotebookLM notebook. The AI analyzes the transcrpt, and then I can ask any and every question about the content. I love listening to podcasts, and generating an Audio Overview of the entire video and listening to it ona. walk or while commuting has been an incredible way to “watch” the video...without even watching it.

For topics that are dense and interconnected, NotebookLM’s Mind Maps feature is also a life-saver, and an excellent way to see how different concepts connect without having to pause and replay sections endlessly. It gives me a bird’s-eye view of the topic, helping me understand the big picture and the finer details at the same time. To reiterate, I’d never do this with a traditional YouTube video I want to watch for leisure. It’s simply a more efficient way to watch hour long videos that I would otherwise need to slog through.