Techy Surgeon · Workflows · Literature & research
For staying current without giving up the weekend.
The NotebookLM literature machine
The most-read setup ever published here: a notebook per topic, sources loaded once, and the literature comes to you as grounded answers and audio overviews on your commute.
The setup
- Open NotebookLM and create one notebook for a topic you actually care about.
- Load 10–20 sources: guidelines, key trials, review PDFs, society statements. It only answers from what you give it — that's the feature.
- Generate an Audio Overview for the commute, then interrogate the notebook with the starter prompt below.
The starter prompt
Acting only from the sources in this notebook: 1) Give the current best-evidence answer to [my question], citing the specific source and section for every claim; 2) Build a mini evidence table — study, design, n, key result, limitation — one row per source that bears on the question; 3) Where sources disagree, name the disagreement and which side the higher-quality evidence supports; 4) Grade the overall evidence strong, moderate, or weak, and name the study that would settle it; 5) Flag anything older than five years or since superseded. If the notebook cannot answer, tell me exactly what source to add.
ChatGPT: ChatGPT works for quick lookups, but NotebookLM's source-grounding is the point — it can't cite a paper that isn't in your notebook.
Claude: Claude is excellent for synthesis, but NotebookLM's grounding and audio overviews are the point of this setup.
Codex: This one belongs in NotebookLM — it's built exactly for this.
Privacy boundary: no PHI in consumer AI tools. Use de-identified text or your health system's covered enterprise instance. Every installable skill ships with the full checklist.
Go deeper, free
▶ Open this in the interactive workflow finder
Members get this workflow as an installable skill with the video walkthrough — plus all 18 skills on the shelf, every update, and the member essays behind them.
Join · $150/yr until Sept 30