How To Use NotebookLM for Work Projects (Complete Guide)

To get started, go to notebooklm.google.com and click on create new notebook. The first thing you're going to see is this screen to add sources. Notebookm is just like having a chat with Gemini, except it will only use the sources you provide it to answer your questions and help you with the things that you need. That means it makes a great member of your team who can be the all- knowing source for everything relating to project, which is really helpful if you've got lots of stuff on the go. So, in my case, I'm going to imagine I'm launching a whole new product and brand. I've got a bunch of different documents like meeting notes from a kickoff meeting, a marketing strategy, a competitor analysis report, a creative brief, and even copy for a website landing page. You could also have YouTube videos or even external websites with articles. The first thing I'm going to do then is click on Google Docs at the bottom here. And I can have up to 300 sources in Notebook Plus. And I'll talk to you more about the different versions at the end of the video. I'm going to select those five different documents that I have about the Eco Gadget project. Insert them. And we can see Notebook LM analyzing them on the left. And now they all have ticks. And then I get this summary in the middle where it's telling me this is all about the Eco Gadget sustainable technology launch plan with a paragraph that tells me all about it. So when we look at Notebook LM, we have these three panels. On the left, we have our sources that I just added. In the middle, we have our chat, which is where we're going to do the bulk of the work. And on the right is our studio, where there's some nice options. and we're going to work through each of those. Now, let's start by looking at chat. Then, in a work capacity, this is a great place to ask questions and make sure that everything you're working on is aligned. In the chat box at the bottom here, I'm going to put what's the main target audience defined in the marketing strategy? Just to show you how this works. Notebook comes back with an answer. It says, "Based on the sources, the main target audience is environmentally conscious millennials and older Gen Z individuals." And you see I have this one next to that piece of writing because it's showing me the source of that piece of information. It's giving me the snippet and then showing me the document name at the bottom here. Super helpful. So I know what it's telling me isn't something it's hallucinated or made up. It's from a document that I've provided as a source. Now it goes into a lot more detail here. Actually a bit too much detail for my liking. But one of the things that we can do is configure this chat. So, if I click on the configure notebook icon here, I can change the conversational style from this default style that's maybe more useful for research. I'm going to switch it to analyst. But you could also give custom instructions here. One example is responding at a PhD level or pretending to be a role- playinging game host. Imagine using Notebook LM to arrange all of your Dungeons and Dragons games. Anyone? No. The other thing I can customize here is the response length. Personally, I prefer shorter answers. So, I'm going to choose shorter because the more wordy just takes more time for me to take everything in. Click save. Let's try something a bit more interesting which I think is a super helpful way to use this for work, which is getting notebook LM to check information is aligned across different sources. In my creative brief, for example, does that match with what we've put together for the landing page copy? So, again, in the chat box, I can type a question. Does the website draft align with the messaging pillars in the creative brief? Hit enter and notebook alm will get to work. Look at both of those sources and let me know what it thinks. Well, good news. The website landing page draft aligns well with the messaging pillars. At the bottom here, though, it even tells me a helpful next step could be to finalize the visual concepts to make sure the imagery and design elements developed by Crystal on the team reinforce the messaging pillars. Really good bit of advice. And if ever you're stuck for what you might ask Notebook LM, there's always suggested questions at the bottom of the chat here. one about target audience, one about a competitor, and this one, what's the primary goal for the Q3 campaign? Let's give that a go. Perfect. There we go. It's given me the goals. And actually, I think it might be helpful to save this as a note. Notes are things that you can easily come back to, and you can even create your own notes. So, let's click save to note. You see, it saves it over on the studio panel on the right hand side here. So, let's look at the studio panel in a bit more detail. There are a few preset things here we can do. I've got the option to create a study guide here, which is probably not as helpful for the kind of thing that I'm using Notebook Alm for at the moment. But a briefing dock could be really helpful. If I imagine I'm on boarding someone new to the team and I want them to be upskilled really quickly, that briefing document could summarize everything nicely and save me a job. There we go. It's created the briefing document as a note. It's got all of the information here like an executive summary, the background of the project, target audience, and the campaign objectives that it knows about so far. Imagine if you had had to go through five documents and then summarize all that. Just how much time that would have taken that is now saved for you to actually get some work done on the project rather than just creating internal documents. Another nice option here in the studio panel is the ability to create a timeline. So let's do that and see what we get. It creates a note. Again, I think this is a really interesting way to look at all of the key dates in a project. So from April 16th where we did the kickoff meeting, it's got upcoming dates for other things in the calendar as well including some deadlines. And of course we can add our own notes as well. So I can click on add note and in this note I might do something like a task list or an action list which becomes really helpful when you realize that you can share this notebook with the rest of the team. So this really does become the oracle of the project that everybody can turn to. To do that, I'm going to click the share button at the top of the screen here. And I'm just going to share this with Tanya, with Christo, and with Kane, who are my collaborators on this project. And I'm going to give them all editor access because I want them to be able to add sources and ask questions as well. If I want to, I can add a welcome note here, which just will pop up something when people first access the notebook. And I have the option here to not allow them access to the full notebook, but just give them access to chat. So if you work in a team like HR for example, imagine you get questions about different policies that exist in your business. You could give Notebook LM all of those policies and have it become the policy expert and then allow everyone else in your business access just to chat with Notebook LM without seeing those sources. That means every time they might have emailed you a question about a policy, they can now just go to that chatbot. For now, I'm going to click send so that this is shared with my colleagues. and we're going to switch to Tanya's view to see what this looks like when someone gets a notebook shared with them. The first thing that happens is they get an email and in that email is a link to open that notebook that's been shared with them. And you can see Tanya's view is exactly the same as mine was when I was logged in. Now Tanya is already on the team. But if she was brand new to the team, one of the first things she might do is read that briefing document and perhaps she might try out this mind map option in the chat here. So if I click on mind map, notebookm looks at all the different links between the sources that I've provided and then creates a really cool mind map to help me visualize and think about them. So in this case, the main point is the launch strategy and then I've got all of the different points here. So for example, the project background and when I click on project background, I could look at the launch date or the value proposition. Or if I go to target audience, it's broken down the different segments of the target audience in this mind map. Or maybe if I go to tone of voice, it gives me the breakdown of tone of voice. And you see as I'm clicking on these things in the mind map, it's effectively asking questions in chat about those things so that I can come back here and learn more about them, too. Now, if this notebook is going to be our one-stop shop for the project, we're going to want to keep it up to date. Tanya happened to run the last weekly meeting. So, she can go to add a source at the top here. It's also a Google Doc, so she can click there and choose those meeting notes and click insert. Now, she might want to double check something like, were all of the actions from the kickoff meeting taken care of in the follow-up meeting? Again, using Notebook LM to check between sources for whether information matches. Here we go. Based on the information, not all of the action items were fully completed. And then it's given us a status update. Super helpful. And whilst we're back looking at sources again, Tanya thinks it might be helpful to add some external articles as sources, but she doesn't have much time to do the research. So, she's going to click on the discover sources button on the top here and describe some sources that she's looking for, articles or videos about sustainable technology trends in 2025 and beyond. Hit submit. All right, there's a few different things here. I can click on the button to open them and look at them, read them, or watch them if I want to. I'm just going to uncheck everything though and choose this one YouTube video here and import that as a source. And with that new source, again, I might ask a question. Is Eco Gadget hitting on the trends discussed in the video? The good news is it looks like Eco Gadget based on everything in the other sources is heading on the trends which is what we want. Now if you're not getting how powerful this is yet, let's just take a step back for a moment. We're creating a centralized knowledge base for a project that we're working on. It could be anything. I'm just using a product launch as an example. And because I've given everyone access, it means they can selfserve when they need to. So as a project leader, they don't have to wait for me to answer their questions. They can just come to the notebook and answer them for themselves. And we can just add everything about this project as sources to the notebook. So if the designer needs something like wants to understand the brief a bit more, they don't have to ask me. They can just come straight to Notebook LM and ask questions about the type of look or colors even that we're using. Or the copywriter doesn't need me to remind them the tone of voice that we're going to go for. They could write their copy and then give it to Notebookm and ask Notebook Alm if it matches the tone of voice that we're going for. or a social media manager might come here and get notebookm to write a few hooks for upcoming social media posts. And if nothing else, we could use this in every meeting that we run about the project to make sure we're not missing out on any actions or important information that we need to be on top of. Now, let's switch back to my view as the project lead. One of the options I've got at the top of the screen here is analytics. Analytics will show me the number of users per day that have accessed the notebook. There needs to be a minimum of four people that it's shared with. And it will also tell me the number of queries per day. That would be really helpful if you were using it with the chatbot like I mentioned earlier. Now, before I tell you more about how to get access to Notebook LM, let's take a quick look at audio overview. If you've seen my previous videos, you'll know that you can create an audio overview in Gemini now. But in Notebook, I can choose customize and provide some instructions for what I want this audio overview to sound like. It's basically a podcast with two people chatting. I could use this audio overview to share to the wider team as a different way of letting them know about our key messaging and what this product is going to be. So, my instructions are saying, "Focus on the key messaging for Eco Gadget in a way that helps other employees understand how we're positioning the product. Keep it snappy and brief. I know people don't want to listen to a 10-minute podcast." I click generate. A few minutes later, we've got our audio overview now, so I can click play and give it a listen. Welcome to this deep dive. We take the information you send us, all those documents and notes, and really boil it down to what matters. That's the idea. Cut through the noise. And today, uh, we're zeroing in on eco gadget. So, that's cool. If you've not heard that before, that's completely synthetic, made up by AI. Those are not real people. But now, we've got interactive mode, which allows me to ask questions and interrupt that conversation, would you believe? So, if I click on interactive mode, and whenever I want to jump in, I'm just going to click that join button, and I can ask a question. Welcome to this deep dive. We take the information you send us, all those documents and notes. Oh, our listeners got something to share. Let's hear it. What is the target audience for this Eco Gadget product anyway? That's a great question. The marketing strategy actually spells it out quite clearly. So, who are they hoping will buy these sustainable gadgets? I'll let you decide if that's helpful or interesting or not. Okay, so a couple of quick things to recap. Use Notebook LM as the expert on all of your work projects. Just create a notebook per project or thing that you're working on and let it become the expert and then share it with your colleagues so they can ask questions as well. Use it to get information to ask questions about everything you're doing and make sure things are aligned, but also to brainstorm with you and help you generate ideas, too. Notebook is free and will allow you to use 50 sources with any Google account. But if you want to be able to do things like customize the style and length of responses, generate more audio overviews and share with your team and get analytics, you're going to need notebook plus. Now, that's included with some Google Workspace subscriptions or with the AI premium plan on Google 1 for consumer accounts. I'll drop some links with information in the description. And by the way, if you want an example notebook to use, I'm going to leave a link to the folder of all of those documents about Eco Gadget that I've created so that you can use those to try it out if you can't think of something real to use it on yet. If you want more tips for using Google Workspace, subscribe to my Workspace Boost newsletter. It's completely free and I send you one immediately actionable tip every Wednesday. If you got any questions, leave them in the comments.