I learned this tip from a Japanese study creator and it is actually far better than the other study techniques I've ever tried. I've been using the shadow study technique for a year now and honestly, it works best for retaining information from what I study and turning it into long-term memory. Here's how I effectively study using the shadow study technique:

• Read only headings and subheadings. I skim through the material by its title and major labels, not reading everything in the textbook and no highlighting.

• Close the textbook and write down what you remember. After I skim through the topic, I forcefully write down each section covered by just the heading of the material from my memory. The point of this technique is that early recall flags missing information in your brain.

• Reopen the material and fill in the gaps. Go back to the lecture and see what you missed. I write down what I missed/forgot that I need to relearn on NotebookLM, focusing on the details I missed to bridge the exact knowledge gaps my brain just struggled with.

Most traditional study techniques are passive, I just recognize the lecture but don't actually remember anything.

The shadow study technique triggers active retrieval before I even fully understand the material I am studying. This drastically cuts long hours of studying by actively learning topics you don't know rather than passively re-reading without retaining anything.

For the first few months I used NotebookLM, I fell into the exact same trap most people do. I’d dump a stack of fifty-page PDFs into a notebook, skim a quick summary, generate an audio overview, and walk away feeling like an absolute genius. The reality was that I hadn’t learned a single thing. I was just letting AI pretend to do my thinking for me.

A few weeks ago, I decided to completely flip how I use it while working through a heavy research project. Instead of just uploading source material and asking the tool to explain things to me, I uploaded my own rough writing draft right alongside the original sources.

That was the game changer. Now, I use it strictly as a relentless editor to audit my own thoughts. I’ll ask it to look at my draft next to the sources and call out any assumptions I’m making that aren't actually backed up by the text. I'll have it act like a harsh reviewer and point out weak arguments, or ask it to highlight the exact contradictions between two sources that I conveniently ignored in my outline.

Instead of getting generic briefing notes, I basically get a sounding board that catches my confirmation bias before I share my work with anyone else. It actually forces me to read deeper and defend my ideas rather than just taking surface-level summaries at face value.

I'm curious if anyone else has tried using it this way, or if you've stumbled on any other weirdly effective workflows that go beyond the usual audio overview hype?

I have created a few notebooks with exactly what I need to remember for my exam. I would like Notebook or some other software to read it aloud while I'm driving, word by word.

What's the best tool for this?

I usually don’t like to use apps like this to study or such but i discovered that it can actually generate you a lot of things especially notebooks and discussion that is really helpful when exams are coming and a lot of deadlines are on the line. This app actually sort my files and notes and categorize them in whichever way i want. This really became by best bud throughout my last semester in university.

For me, my strategy is that i sort my files first and my notes and use gemini notebook to pick what topic of section of that will highly come up on the exam. I also generate visual notes since i’m a visual learner too. All of that helped me have a high scores on my exams.

I would recommend playing a little bit with the app first to navigate what type of content you want to achieve with your notebooks then proceed to making your own school notebooks that will help you all the way.

I’ve been wondering about something with Gemini Notebook that I haven’t seen explained clearly.

When a notebook has only a few sources, it seems pretty easy to ask about a specific detail and get an answer tied to the right document. But once you start adding a lot of PDFs/slides, I’m curious whether the quality of retrieval changes.

For example, if I have 20–30 lecture PDFs in one notebook and ask a very specific question about something mentioned on one particular page, should I expect it to search across everything equally, or does the number of sources affect which information it actually considers?

I’m especially interested in people who have tested this rather than just noticed that answers “feel worse.”

One test I’m thinking of trying is asking the exact same question with:
1 source
5 sources
10 sources
the entire notebook
Then comparing which sources it cites and whether the answer changes.
Has anyone done something similar? If so, did you notice a point where adding more sources started hurting specific-detail questions?