How I finally stopped drowning in YouTube tutorials and actually learned something

Let’s be real for a second: my Notion workspace is essentially a digital graveyard. It’s where “life-changing” ideas go to be buried under three layers of folders and never seen again. I’ve tried them all—Google Keep for the shower thoughts, Obsidian for the “I’m an intellectual” phase, and Notion for the “I’m definitely going to organize my life this Tuesday” phase.

But there’s a massive problem that nobody talks about. These apps are only as good as the work you put into them. They’re empty boxes. And if you’re like me, watching a 20-minute YouTube video on “The Basics of Quantum Mechanics” (or, you know, how to fix a leaky sink) while trying to type out coherent notes is a recipe for a headache. You hit pause, you type, you rewind because you missed a step, you hit play, you get a Discord notification, and suddenly an hour has passed and you’ve learned exactly nothing.

Enter NotebookLM. It’s basically the smart friend who actually pays attention in class while you’re doodling in the back, and then gives you the best SparkNotes version ever created.

The YouTube Speed Trap

We’ve all been there. You find a creator who is clearly a genius, but they talk like they’ve had four espressos and assume you already have a PhD in whatever they’re teaching. You can slow the video down to 0.75x, but then they sound like they’re under a heavy sedative, which isn’t exactly great for focus.

Pairing YouTube with NotebookLM is the ultimate “slow down” button. Instead of fighting the video’s pace, you just feed the link into a notebook. It’s like taking a blender to the video, spinning it around, and pouring out a perfectly smooth smoothie of information. If a creator skips a step—which they always do—I just ask the AI, “Hey, what did they mean in that third step about the API key?” and it explains it using the context of the video. No more frantic rewinding.

Building a Mega-Lesson from Five Different Gurus

The real magic happens when you stop looking at videos as individual islands. Usually, when I want to learn something—let’s say, how to not be broke—I’ll watch five different “Personal Finance 101” videos. Normally, that’s five different sets of notes, five different terminologies, and a whole lot of overlapping (and sometimes contradictory) advice.

With NotebookLM, I dump all five links into one notebook. It’s like inviting all those creators to a roundtable discussion where I’m the moderator. The AI stitches their ideas together. It tells me, “Creator A says you should save 20%, but Creator B thinks you should invest that 20% into index funds immediately.”

It creates a “Master Lesson” out of thin air. It spots the patterns, highlights the disagreements, and connects the dots between a video on “Budgeting” and a video on “Compound Interest” without me having to manually drag-and-drop a single thought.

The “Lazy Person’s” Superpower: The Extension

If you’re still manually copying and pasting URLs like it’s 2010, please stop. There’s a Chrome extension (YouTube to NotebookLM) that basically adds a “Teleport to Brain” button right on the YouTube interface.

When I’m deep in a rabbit hole about psychology or whatever the algorithm has decided I’m interested in today, I just click the button. One click, and that 40-minute deep dive is now a searchable, queryable document in my notebook. It’s dangerously efficient.

Visualizing the Chaos with Mind Maps

I’m a visual learner, which is just a fancy way of saying I need to see how things connect or I’ll forget them in five minutes. NotebookLM has this Mind Map feature that is honestly kind of spooky.

It takes the mess of information from your videos and turns it into a branching tree of logic. If you’re learning about habit formation, it’ll put “Habits” in the middle and branch out to “Cue,” “Routine,” and “Reward,” pulling specific examples from the videos you just “watched” (or, you know, let the AI watch for you). It’s the perfect “previously on…” recap to look at before you start a new session.

The “Fake Podcast” Strategy (Audio Overviews)

This is probably the coolest/weirdest part of the whole setup. NotebookLM can generate these “Audio Overviews” that sound like two people hosting a podcast about your notes.

I’ll take a three-hour playlist of technical tutorials and turn it into a 10-minute podcast. Then, I’ll listen to it while I’m doing the dishes or walking the dog. It’s the ultimate reinforcement. You hear the core concepts being discussed in a casual way, and if they mention something that makes you go “Wait, what?”, you can jump back into the notebook and check the transcript. It’s like having a custom-made radio station that only talks about the stuff you actually want to learn.

How to Not Break the AI (Pro Tips)

Look, AI is smart, but it’s not a mind reader. If you just dump 50 random videos into one notebook, you’re going to get a digital soup that tastes like nothing. Here’s my low-effort, high-reward strategy:

1. Stay Themed: One notebook per topic. Don’t mix your “How to Bake Sourdough” videos with your “Python Coding” videos. The AI will try to find connections, and you’ll end up with a sourdough-based coding language. Nobody wants that.
2. Talk to it like a human: Instead of “Summarize this,” try “Explain this to me like I’ve never used a computer before” or “Give me a 5-question quiz to see if I actually understood the part about tax brackets.”
3. Scenario-based prompts: I love asking, “Based on these videos, how would I solve [specific problem]?” It forces the AI to apply the knowledge, which helps you see if the info is actually practical.

The Verdict: Work Smarter, Not Harder

At the end of the day, note-taking shouldn’t feel like a part-time job. We’re already spending hours on YouTube; we might as well get some actual knowledge out of it instead of just a vague memory of a thumbnail.

Using NotebookLM isn’t about being lazy (okay, maybe it’s 10% about being lazy). It’s about offloading the boring stuff—summarizing, organizing, and cross-referencing—so you can focus on the actual learning part.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a “Master Lesson” on how to finally finish a 1,000-piece puzzle to get through. Happy learning!

• Tags:
• YouTube
• AI
• Note Taking
• Learning Strategies