Welcome to Day 2 of the Second Brain Operating System.
Yesterday, we installed the Notion Second Brain OS integration. Now, you have a home for all your ideas.
This means any ideas you capture through the Second Brain OS customGPT or the quick capture (Day 3) will land here.
What’s the point?
- You can browse all your ideas as would traditionally, because sometimes we just need a visual canvas to move through our notes
- You can continue writing and extend ideas for publishing on social
- You have a single place for scheduling every type of content
- Your ideas are instantly connected and searchable
I promised something at the time of purchase, and you’ll see it come true today.
That promise was simple: once you use the Second Brain OS, you will wonder why you spent so much time creating tables in Notion or linking your thinking in Obsidian.
Put simply, you will question why you purchased so many Notion templates, glued things with Zapier, built productivity systems and still abandoned them.
It’s okay to feel that way and I am preparing you in advance. We all need to be forgiving of ourselves because the productivity market and the health supplement market have something in common.
It’s called “filling”. The filling approach is a powerful method based on the sunk cost. The more someone or something fills your day, the more important they become. Filling makes the task at hand feel dense. Think organising Notion. It’s time consuming, “dense” work that makes you wonder where you day went.
With the Second Brain OS, your days are going to get “unfilled”. All that petty overload from micro tasks that never get accounted for is going to disappear.
Now I left you with a thought yesterday. It’s that you’ve moved to a brand new home or apartment, and there’s no furniture.
Empty isn’t a great feeling. We as humans tend to become very uncomfortable whether it’s emptiness on the inside or in our physical space.
Being cluttered is the other extreme.
So what we want is a balance that gives us space to breathe, but has all the things we need. All our notes in one place, related by meaning and without the hassle of sorting, filtering, naming, tagging or labelling.
Today, we are going to make the Second Brain OS feel like home.
But here’s the best part: you have no cardboard boxes to deal with or washing to do at the end of it.
Everything will be taken care of because you have my full support through this.
Let’s do this!
First, you’re going to export your notes to markdown using whatever note taking app you’re currently using.
Note: if you’re an existing Notion user, you will also have to follow this process
Note: Google Keep is fully supported. When you export your notes from Google Keep, your notes will be in JSON format. Google Keep also gives you HTML files, which are copies your notes but in a “browser friendly format”. What we will need today from a Google Keep export are the JSON files and images.
I’ve added some quick screen recordings here for a few common apps.
Exporting from Apple Notes to Markdown
The process requires a Mac computer with macOS, as it won’t work on an iPhone. However, your iPhone notes will automatically sync to your laptop via iCloud.
Main steps:
- Download and install the exporter app from the macOS App Store
- Open the white icon of the exporter app
- Create or select a folder for exporting your notes (e.g., “Apple Notes Export” in Downloads)
- Click export and wait for the process to complete
- Navigate to your export folder, where you’ll find an “icloud” folder containing a “Notes” folder with all your exported notes
Exporting from Google Keep to Markdown
The process uses Google Takeout to export your Keep notes.
Main steps:
- Go to takeout.google.com
- Deselect all services using the “Deselect all” option
- Use Command+F/Control+F to search for “Keep”
- Select only Google Keep
- Click Next step
- Keep the default settings (2GB export size is usually sufficient)
- Click Create Export
- Wait for two emails from Google (export requested and export ready)
- Download the export file
- Unzip the downloaded file
- Navigate to Takeout/Keep folder
- Sort files by kind
- Select all JSON and image files for your export
Exporting from Obsidian to Markdown
Since Obsidian already uses Markdown, this process simply involves locating your vault files.
Main steps:
- In Obsidian, click File > Open Vault
- Find your desired vault in the list
- Click the three-dot menu next to the vault
- Select “Reveal Vault in Finder” (or equivalent on Windows)
- Navigate to the correct folder containing your notes
- Note: If your notes are in a subfolder, you may need to navigate further into the revealed folder
Exporting from Notion to Markdown
Notion offers three export options: entire workspace, specific database, or individual page.
For entire workspace:
- Click your profile
- Go to Settings > Workspace settings
- Scroll to “Export content”
- Click “Export all workspace content”
- Select settings: Markdown and CSV, Current View, Create folders for sub-pages
- Click Export
- Check your Notion inbox for the download link
- Download and unzip the file
- Filter for .md or .markdown files
For specific database:
- Open the database
- Click the three-dot menu
- Select Export
- Choose settings: Markdown and CSV, Current View, include subpages
- Uncheck “Create folders for subpages”
- Click Export
For individual page:
- Open the specific page
- Click the three-dot menu
- Select Export
- Choose the same settings as database export: Markdown and CSV, Current View, include subpages
- Click Export and wait for the download link
Exporting from Evernote to Markdown
This process uses Obsidian’s Importer plugin to convert Evernote’s .enex files to Markdown format.
Main steps:
- In Evernote, locate and open your notebooks
- Click Export Notebook and select the .enex format
- Choose a download location for the export
- Open Obsidian and create a new vault (e.g., “Forevernote”)
- Enable Community Plugins in Obsidian Settings
- Install and enable the Importer plugin
- Configure the hotkey as Control+Command+R
- Use the hotkey (Control+Command+R) to open the Importer
- Select Evernote as the source and choose your .enex file
- Complete the import process
- Find your converted Markdown files in the new vault folder under Evernote/[Notebook Name]
Let’s Import Your Notes Into The Second Brain OS
Once you’ve exported your notes, we are going to upload them to GitHub.
Sounds strange but I promise, there is no coding involved.
You may have heard the term “GitHub repository”? It’s just a fancy term for “a place on the cloud to store your files”.
GitHub (before anything) is a fast, lightweight and free place on the cloud to store files.
So here are the steps:
- Create a GitHub account and make sure to take a note of your GitHub username
- Then create a new repository. You can call it something like “my_notes”. Make sure you set it to “private”
- Click the “upload an existing file” and select up to 100 files at a time to upload
- Keep uploading files until you feel you’re ready
Now we move to installing the Second Brain OS GitHub integration. You can install it by entering your email and submitting the form below.
Once done, you will land on a page where you can start the import process. To start it, you need to specify your GitHub username and the repo name. This tells the Second Brain OS where to fetch your notes from.
Once you make a request, it will pull your notes from the GitHub repo and convert them into the AI Friendly format called “vector embedding”.
Because of this, you will be able to start chatting with the ideas you had 3, 6, 9 or 12 months ago TODAY!
Bonus: you can create as many GitHub repositories as you like, especially if you have notes stored across different apps. All you have to do is come back to the form and submit it to start the import process again.
Couple of common questions:
1- When I import notes more than once, what happens to the notes I added earlier?
Your previous notes don’t get erased. Instead, the Second Brain OS connects new knowledge to past knowledge. Each time you add a note or add a 100+ notes, the Second Brain OS connects them instantly.
2- After I import the notes, do I need to keep the GitHub repository?
Nop! Not at all! You can delete the GitHub repo once the import process is done. In fact, I’d recommend you delete the GitHub repo after you get an email from me at the end of the import process.
3- How many notes can I upload to Github repo? Can I upload notes from multiple different apps to GitHub?
- There’s no limit. Upload as many as you like
- You can include notes from multiple different apps in the same repo
- For Google Keep, the export you get contains json, images & html files. Make sure to upload the json & images to the GitHub repo. You can include markdown from another app in the same repo (should you wish to!).
4- I just imported my notes. Now I want to import more. Should I use the same GitHub repo?
Great question! No, please don’t use the same GitHub repository.
Instead, create a new GitHub repository and upload any notes you missed to that one.
Alternatively, you can delete your current GitHub repository and create a new one with the same name.
The point is that whenever you start a brand new import, then make sure you also start from a brand new repository which doesn’t contain any notes you already uploaded.
And Now You Can Chat With Your Notes Inside ChatGPT
Now that your notes are pushed to the Second Brain OS, head to the customGPT.
Authenticate yourself and now you can start searching through your knowledge.
Congratulations, you now have Google Search for your brain.
Some quick pro tips:
- userQuery: this means the text used to search your Second Brain OS
- searchK: this means how many results to fetch from your Second Brain OS
The way to indulge is to search and search whatever comes to mind. This makes it easy to get back to any past thoughts you’ve had on the subject. You can even ask the customGPT to make a search, learn from the results and make another search itself. You can also ask it to bring a few or a lot of search results.
The magic has just started, because tomorrow we will be adding new ideas to our knowledge as we consume content.
You will see how our knowledge gets updated and connected in real time with every new addition.
And this is what gives us “real time context”, which means ChatGPT (or any large language model you connect to your Second Brain OS) will instantly be on the same page as you.
I’m going to digress for a moment.
I am a bit crazy when it comes to coffee, especially espresso. Everything from brewing to serving. An important rule in espresso is that once you serve it, you move away.
Why? You want the person to experience it on their own and immerse themselves fully.
Now that I have served you the espresso, I am going to take a few steps back so that you can search through your ideas and play with them however you like. It’s your personal space, slice and dice however you like.
As always, feel free to drop me an email on newsletter@umairkamil.com if you have any questions!
Have fun and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow!
