Welcome to Day 1 of the Second Brain Operating System.
First, congratulations!
And I am not congratulating you again for the sake of it. You’ve actually taken a real decision for increasing mental space.
I’d like you take a moment and press 4 fingers from your left hand & 4 fingers from your right hand against your forehead. Press hard. And now tell me what you feel isn’t real.
It’s actual physical matter that has limited space.
And because you’re living creature who is darted with petabytes of information every day, it’s only natural to feel overloaded.
That’s not your fault. It’s the unfortunate world we live in.
Just as any living creature, you and I have a tendency to be overloaded. And let’s face it, we talk so much about good sleep, the gut & the microbiome, our relationships, our physical activity and our lifestyle when it comes to mental health.
But we forget that after oxygen, the single biggest thing we consume is information. Before anything manifests itself as stress or anxiety or mere thought, it appears as information.
Our goal today is to give your brain an extension, one that it can dump to and free itself. Not everything deserves your valuable mental space. And with the right kind of system in place, returning to it will be easy and guilt free.
Which is exactly why having a Second Brain OS is directly tied to mental clarity.
Every time you hit a button on your keyboard to add an idea OR every time you ask AI during a conversation to “push that note”, you’ll get space. In a very real, tangible and physical way.
Now we will get back to our conversation here, but I want to make it very real for you. So let’s get the “mechanical” stuff out of the way
Step 1: Creating Your New Notion Workspace
I know some of you already use Notion and might be thinking, ‘Can’t I just add this to my existing workspace?
Here’s why we’re starting fresh:
- Clean slate = clear mind
- Zero baggage from old systems
- No temptation to merge with existing chaos
- And we will cover how to bring any existing pages from your current Notion to the Second Brain OS tomorrow
Think of it like moving to a new house – sometimes it’s easier to start with empty rooms and bring in only what you really need.
- Open your browser and head to notion.so
- If you don’t have an account, sign up – it’s free
- Once you’re in, click that fancy ‘+ New workspace’ button
- Name it something cool – I’m going with ‘My Second Brain OS’
- Skip all those templates Notion offers – we’ve got something better coming
Pro Tip: Don’t let yourself get distracted by all those shiny Notion features just yet. We’re on a mission here!
Step 2: Installing the Second Brain OS Integration
Now for the fun part:
- Head back to this page
- Pop in your email in the form below and hit that submit button
- Go through the “Installation Flow”, and make sure you select “Use Template From Developer” when prompted
- Head back to your new workspace, wait a minute, hit refresh and… BOOM! SECOND BRAIN OS installed
Step 3: Understanding the Layout
Notice how everything is organized into three main sections:
- Notes (your idea vault)
- Tasks (your action centre)
- Files (your document tree)
Most of what you capture will exist as a “note”.
Ideas, thoughts, breakthroughs, reflections, concepts, observations and so on. As part of this course, I will be going deep into this, especially on Day 4.
You can of course capture tasks as well, if you already use Notion for tasks or intend to. One creative way is that you ask the Second Brain OS customGPT to help plan your day and then push all the action items as tasks. I’ll be doing a separate video & newsletter down the road on this, but I trust you to be smart and try this for yourself.
On files: if you purchased the upsell or the premium plan, I will walk you through this in detail in that email separately.
Important:
- The Second Brain OS customGPT can add notes & tasks
- The Second Brain OS customGPT can search by meaning through all your notes
- The Second Brain OS custom can search files by their names and find the specific one you’re after while also presenting related files
- The Second Brain OS custom can not look into or read file contents
- The Second Brain OS custom can not search tasks
These are very conscious decisions I’ve made while designing and coding up the Second Brain OS.
To shed a bit of light, I have experimented with a lot of large language models to see how they relate things and when they confuse things. Because of this, at a technical level, I make sure that in the Second Brain OS tasks, files and notes don’t get mixed.
What does this mean for you?
You get an optimal result by connecting any large language model to your Second Brain Operating System (such as ChatGPT in today’s case) because I have implemented some strict measures that prevent AI from getting confused.
Common Questions
What about my existing Notion setup?’
- Keep it!
- You can easily move pages from your existing Notion Workspace to your new one (we will deal with that tomorrow!)
Do I need to organize everything perfectly?
- Nope! The system does the heavy lifting (the Second Brain OS customGPT adds tags/labels when you push a Note to Notion— but keep in mind, these tags/labels are for you. The Second Brain OS is intelligent enough to search & find things without help from tags/labels)
- Just ask, capture and let it work its magic
Let’s continue our conversation: creating mental space.
With the mechanical stuff out of the way, we are ready to have a lot of fun!
Head over to the Second Brain OS customGPT, you can find the details in the “Added A Chatbot” email I sent earlier.
Once you’ve authenticated using the ChatbotID and your email, the customGPT can now access your Second Brain OS.
I am sure this makes sense to you because only you should have access to your knowledge. But as this can get annoying, I do offer “a done for you” customGPT with your name, picture and “always authenticated” mode enabled. This means you can skip the hassle of authenticating. Should that interest you, you can always email me and we can do a 1:1 to get that sorted for you. Of course, this is included by default for the people who bought the premium plan earlier.
So now that you’re in, get a random youtube video link and ask it to crawl/watch the video for you. Once it’s done and given you the key insights, ask it to push to your notes. There’s different things you can say and it will understand what you mean each time:
- “Add this to my knowledge”
- “Push to notion as a note”
- “Add note of this”
Now that it’s in your knowledge, it’s immediately linked to any past knowledge and instantly searchable.
To test this out, I recommend giving the Second Brain OS customGPT a couple of related videos (one by one for best results) to watch them and push the results to your knowledge.
Then you can start a new conversation with the “Second Brain OS customGPT” and ask it to search through your knowledge for the “theme/topic/ideas” related to the videos you gave it earlier.
You will be shocked at how cohesively it brings together the insights from those videos.
Now let me get your creative juices flowing: you have an AI agent that can quote on quote “consume content on your behalf”.
Not to contradict myself, an LLM probably won’t rival a human when it comes to perception and nuanced insights any time soon. But you will find it bloody good for consuming and summarising a lot of key information.
So you can pick a niche, get together some links for web articles, newsletters and youtube videos. Then simply ask it to go through each one by one and push to your knowledge.
As of present, it should be able to crawl YouTube videos with a 90% success rate. And website articles with an 80% success rate. Needless to say, I am working to improve this to the 99% level! BUT BUT it won’t crawl anything behind a paywall or where the author has put a limitation in place. This limitation is by choice, as I want to respect those people.
It doesn’t end here, because during work or office hours, you can have the Second Brain OS customGPT open in one tab, have a conversation with what you’re thinking of or upload a picture of some notes you jotted down —> and ask it to push to your knowledge.
As always, everything will appear in Notion so that you can also browse it in a traditional format and be instantly searchable using the Second Brain OS customGPT.
Whatever you add, will be related by meaning. So you can be rest assured that if you make it consume some content on “iPhone reviews” it won’t mix them up with “Figuring out what kind of diet works for me”.
Phew!
All done. You’ve achieved a lot today.
Can you believe that we did this by just installing the Notion Second Brain OS Integration? That one mechanical step has laid the foundation for endless brain dumps and creative flows. While I know it’s only day one, keep in mind that you should never hesitate to be creative with the Second Brain OS customGPT.
Now I have a very small ask.
You know how when you buy a car and the fuel tank is empty? Or you move into a new home/apartment and there’s not much furniture?
I bet you probably feel like that. Because right now your Second Brain OS is empty.
But I don’t want you to feel the way.
So tomorrow, we are going to bring over your notes from whatever apps you use OR stopped using, so that we can start chatting with the knowledge you’ve accumulated digitally.
My ask is simple. Just like today, open the email and take the action steps. I promise life gets so much easier, because there’s no one better then a version of yourself (who never gets tired or emotionally drained) to rely on— a true Second Brain OS.
I hope you enjoyed our chat today and if there’s anything you’d like me to know, I am all ears! Feel free to email me at newsletter@umairkamil.com
