By Nolen Jonker
Publication Date: 2025-11-30 00:00:00
Luckily I don’t do research-heavy work that often. I’m studying design and most of the materials are already curated, and most of my tech articles aren’t that research-heavy either since they’re topics I already know. But now and then, I hit those projects where I do need to dig, and that’s where things start getting messy. I end up with 50 open tabs and notes across ten different platforms that I’ll “sort later”. So I wanted to narrow down my system to just a handful of tools that I can easily keep track of, and that can also speedrun the research process.
What I landed on was Perplexity, NotebookLM, and Windows Notepad with my local text stack. At the time of writing, there is no official integration for any of these apps; however, if you have Google Drive, then you can pretty much consider your workflow integrated. Here’s how I’ve been pairing these tools to cut down on distraction and overwhelm, and hone in on the actual work…
