PAI is a personal knowledge and project management method proposed by Raymond Hou (Raymond). Its name comes from three core components: Project, Action, and Inbox. Raymond uses this architecture as the smallest unit for all the sustainable systems he runs in Notion. He argues that the purpose of knowledge management is not to collect and categorize, but to make actions and projects the primary workflow and collections a supporting one. It is a localized reworking of the Second Brain (Second Brain) concept and one of the core methods in Raymond’s Notion teaching and Super Individual work-systems course.
Origins: Revising PARA
PAI grew directly out of the PARA classification system in Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain (Project, Area, Resource, Archive). Raymond finished the book in June 2021, when it was available only in English. After practicing PARA for about three months, he found that a collection-centered workflow made him more anxious and displaced time for advancing existing projects and solving problems. In September of that year, while opening the first Notion online boot camp, he simplified PARA and focused it on actionability, introducing PAI. 1 After about a year of iteration and multiple versions, he published the complete method in blog posts and YouTube videos in 2023 and 2024. Raymond describes it as “a reflection on six months of practicing PARA, plus the essence of three years of continued iteration.”
Core Components
PAI’s three components correspond to three databases, linked through Notion relations:
- P (Project): A series of tasks with a clear starting need and a deliverable endpoint, carried out over a defined period—for example, preparing a boot camp for a particular year or running a channel. It is not an ongoing area such as “health” or “personal finance.” Every project requires a written Why and is treated as a work of its owner.
- A (Action): The smallest executable task broken out from a project. One card equals one task and includes its status, assignee, deadline, time spent, and a one-sentence summary. Detailed execution notes, problems, and lessons can be recorded on the card.
- I (Inbox): A place for reference material collected externally during work. It is deliberately separate from the project database to discourage direct copying and pasting. Collected items are marked by maturity (🌱→☀️→🌲), reminding users to internalize other people’s experience and develop their own version before using it.
Raymond sums up the spirit of the system in two sentences: “Each card is a record of your actions; each project is your knowledge base.” 2
Design Principles
PAI rests on several consistent ideas. First, “output determines input”: the highest-priority label for anything entering the Inbox is the project currently in progress; categorization is secondary. Valuable material unrelated to a current project can be held in a separate No Project view. Second, content management should move from “dots” (folders and tags) to a “web” (database relations, metadata, and multiple views), allowing one item of information to belong to several contexts and reducing duplicate collection and inefficient retrieval. Third, “nothing is deleted; it is only filtered out”: views hide data through conditions rather than deleting it. For example, a card whose retrospective is complete moves from the work view to the retrospective view. These principles reflect Raymond’s consistent view of tools as extensions of thought and action, rather than static warehouses.
Variations and Applications
PAI’s three-layer structure can swap its contents to fit a context while keeping the same skeleton. Raymond and his students have applied it to interior design project management, remote team management, a personal Life OS, and annual goals and retrospectives. In an annual version, Project becomes annual goals and long-term values, while the Inbox changes from a diary database to a periodic retrospective database. A frequently cited extension is a student who works as a fitness coach. Instead of collecting health articles in a scattered way, the coach made each student a Project, teaching and guidance the Actions, and information tailored to each student’s needs the Inbox—making each student a work of the coach. Raymond also combines PAI with Notion AI, arguing that AI can directly draw on users’ accumulated personalized documents and turn “looking for knowledge” into “asking knowledge.”
Positioning
PAI is a signature method in Raymond’s Notion teaching. Its related templates are available free through the Notion template center, and it is a central approach to knowledge management in his Super Individual work-systems course. It serves Raymond’s broader proposition: individuals should turn their expertise and experience into reusable assets, rather than becoming “librarians” who collect other people’s content. In this sense, PAI shares the same roots as his discussions of Time Management (time management), Attention > Time > Money (attention over time over money), and Super Individual (Super Individual): all are tool designs that direct limited attention back to meaningful output.
Sources
Footnotes
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Raymond Hou, “Why I No Longer Use PARA: Stop Falling into the Collection and Categorization Trap—One Core Principle of Knowledge Management? (Original Notion Template),” WordPress, 2023-09-19. View original ↩
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Raymond Hou, “Was My Note-Taking Method Wrong? The Misunderstood Second Brain? Why Notion Doesn’t Work Well? An Explanation of the PAI System Template,” WordPress, 2024-09-23. View original ↩