Saikat Basu on Muck Rack

Saikat Basu

Verified
Kolkata
As seen in: MSN, Yahoo Life, MSN Money Canada, Lifehacker, Taylor & Francis Online, Flipboard, JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association), MUO, Lifewire, Guiding Tech and
Tech Blogger, Editor, A Learning Maverick, and Visualholic
Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work. Claim your profile

Get in touch with Saikat

Contact Saikat, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.

Learn more about Muck Rack

Actions

Share this page

Is this you?

As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile

Articles

Most NotebookLM users skip the configuration step entirely — these 5 settings change everything

|
By Saikat Basu 
| MUO
Custom instructions improve every response Custom instructions are the most critical setting in NotebookLM. You'll find them under the slider icon at the top of the Chat panel. Click it, select Custom, and you get a text field where you can define a role, tone, output format, and context. Think of it as a meta-prompt exclusive to that notebook. Whatever you write there shapes every response and also every Studio output until you change it. I used to restate some bits of context in every prompt.
Open in Who Shared Issue with article?

There's a NotebookLM prompt that gives you a bird's-eye view of everything you've uploaded

|
By Saikat Basu 
| MUO
That's why I rely on a simple prompt that forces NotebookLM to map out every source, its key themes, and how each one connects to the others. It's like an umbrella document that gives a bird's-eye view of the notebook. It takes thirty seconds and changes how you or any collaborator can work with the information in it. This technique is part of my 5-step NotebookLM workflow.
Open in Who Shared Issue with article?

I stopped organizing my notes and let this new app do it

|
By Saikat Basu 
| MUO
All of us who love notetaking have spent hours hunting for or building the perfect digital notebook. My app of choice as a recent convert is Obsidian. It overwhelmed me at first, but now I love formatting notes, typing out complex tags, and linking notes by hand. It feels productive, but it can be exhausting. I wonder if I will spend more time cleaning my notes than actually writing them. The search for the next shiny productivity app never goes away. So, I am experimenting with a new app called Mem.
Open in Who Shared Issue with article?
See all 1,140 licensed articles (1,179 Total)

Actions

Share this page

Get in touch with Saikat

Contact Saikat, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.

Learn more about Muck Rack
 •  Privacy  •  Terms  •  Security and Legal  •   •   •   • 

© 2026 Muck Rack

SOC 2® Certified