Daily Good Company · October 29, 2026
A pile of reading can be useful and still be hard to navigate. Sometimes the next helpful step is seeing which ideas belong together.
Google's Gemini Notebook, formerly NotebookLM, offers one way to do that. Its Mind Maps feature turns uploaded sources into a branching diagram of topics and related ideas. You can expand branches and select a topic to ask questions about it in the notebook's chat. Google's current help page says the mobile app does not support this feature, usage limits apply, and generated responses still need checking. See Google's Mind Maps guide.
Who might find this useful?
Someone who already has a small collection of material and wants a way into it. Think of a few public articles about container gardening, rather than an entire folder of private work records.
Here is a modest experiment:
Choose two or three public sources you trust and are permitted to use.
Generate a map, if the feature is available in your account.
Pick one branch you understand well. Compare it with the original material.
Pick one branch that surprises you. Ask what supports that connection, then check the answer against the sources.
Notice both what appears and what is missing. Did the map keep two different ideas separate? Did it give a minor point more attention than it deserved? Could you find the passage behind a useful claim?
This is a suggested exercise, not a report of our own test. You do not need to move your whole reading habit into a new app. A pencil and a page may be enough.
The useful question is whether the diagram helps you return to the material with a clearer question. A tidy picture alone does not tell you that.
