Your 'Save for Later' System Is a Graveyard

If you’re like me, you check out a lot stuff throughout the week.

Articles. Videos. LinkedIn posts. Tweets (Xs?). Random things you stumble on that seem useful.

A couple things happen.

You skim/read/watch, and forget.

Or you try to save them into some kind of bookmark manager telling yourself you’ll come back to it.

And then never do.

A few weeks ago I came across the idea to create a weekly Google Notebook LM notebook, and drop the things I come across that are worth saving/coming back to in it.

It takes maybe 5 extra seconds each time.

Then, at any point, I can open that notebook and chat with everything I saved that week. Ask it questions. Dig deeper into something I skimmed. It's like having a research assistant who actually read everything you bookmarked.

But NotebookLM doesn't just store things. It finds connections between your sources that you might not see yourself. You drop in an article about organic reach dying and a video about content strategy, and it can surface the thread running between them.

Here's an example.

I had NotebookLM create a presentation summarizing what I saved during the last week of January.

One slide surprised me:

It pulled from a video I'd saved about the death of organic social and a concept called "the showrunner strategy." The idea: stop posting random content like a social media manager. Start thinking like a TV network. Recurring characters. Recurring sets and themes. Treat your feed like a broadcast schedule with actual shows, not one-off posts.

I had completely forgotten I saved that video.

Would have lost it forever in my YouTube history graveyard.

Instead, I went back into NotebookLM, chatted with the source to understand the idea deeper, and now it's something I'm thinking about how to bring a client as part of our content strategy discussion.

Result?

One forgotten video → rediscovered by AI → could become a real client strategy.

1️⃣ Create a new NotebookLM notebook each week (I name mine by date range, like "2026.02.09-2026.02.15")

2️⃣ Save sources throughout the week. NotebookLM can ingest web pages, YouTube videos, PDFs, Google Docs, and more.

3️⃣ Chat with your notebook anytime. Ask it questions like "What were the main themes this week?" or "What connections do you see between these sources?"

4️⃣ Generate a presentation at week's end. NotebookLM can create slides summarizing everything you saved. It's like a highlight reel of your own curiosity. That's how I rediscovered the showrunner video.

5️⃣ Bonus: Audio & Video Overview. You can also have it generate a podcast-style audio summary or a short video.

The stuff I save online isn't the problem. It's that I never resurface it.

I've got bookmark folders with hundreds of links I'll never reopen. I’ve tried saving to Pocket (does that still exist?). Used Raindrop for a while. Start watching YT videos and tell myself I’ll go back to my history and finish them “later.”

NotebookLM ends that. Instead of saving things and forgetting them, you save things and they become searchable, chattable, connectable knowledge.

The weekly notebook habit means I'm not building one massive overwhelm pile. Each week is its own little knowledge capsule. Small enough to be useful. Big enough to surprise you.

That showrunner slide? I didn't go looking for it. NotebookLM surfaced it because I gave it the raw material to work with. And it connected it to other things I'd been reading about content strategy that week.

The only downside to this is then trying to remember which week I saved something in. Which is why I’m also thinking about how I can combine this with my thematic notebooks.

It maybe be as simple as copying the best sources over into notebooks organized by theme. Another possibility I plan to look into is using Claude Cowork to access my NotebookLM notebooks. I think that’s possible but am not sure yet.

But so far I’m finding this way of saving content is simple, and brings a lot of value.

👉 Google NotebookLM

👉 This Free Chrome Extension makes it quick to save to NotebookLM

👉 The article that inspired me to do this

👉 The showrunner strategy video

Thanks for reading!

Nathan Rodgers

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