The Get Things Done people have a lot of problems, what with stress and guarding the SUV against scratches. The Put Things Off people have a cup of tea and a little read of Dowtcha Boy! , An Anthology of Cork Slang by Morty McCarthy.

Darling, it's another world down there.

You might think that the Get Things Done people have had it all their own way for too long, what with all that admiration, sympathy and praise. Indeed, only last week the Get Things Done people got another book devoted to them, called Getting Things Done by someone called David Allen.

David Allen is a GTD person, obviously.

The late Dave Allen, on the other hand, was gloriously PTO, RIP.

Irish politicians are PTO, as we all know. They put every decision off until the next election, a system which has worked very well for them . . . so far. I think most parents, interestingly, have also been beaten into a permanent state of PTO. As in, ?Jesus, we'll worry about that when it happens." There is after all, only so much tension that the human frame can sustain.

All Irish managers, of everything, are PTO to their core.

Why make a decision that could get you in to trouble when you can wait for the other guy to make a mistake?

RTE, for example, is almost universally PTO. And so is the civil service. Some people think that MRSA is the greatest threat to our health service, but they have never understood that the whole edifice has been fatally undermined by the PTO bug, which was endemic within it from its inception.

This David Allen guy wants everyone to be a GTD person, but this is a mistake.

David Allen wants us all to make lists, start in-trays and to wander around our kitchen holding the phonebill and muttering, ?Is this actionable?"

By which he means, presumably, not whether the bill is the basis for a law suit, but whether you can do something with it . . . like pay it.

The PTO person does not wander round their kitchen holding the phonebill and wondering whether it is actionable.

The PTO person puts the phonebill in a drawer with some other bills, the hammer, some rolls of Sellotape and an old purse, and forgets about it.

According to an interview in last Friday's Irish Times . . . the Irish Times is terribly GTD, and gets very annoyed with people who are not . . . David Allen has a two-minute rule. The rule is that if you can complete a task within two minutes then that task should be undertaken forthwith.

All PTO people know that this twominute rule is, in fact, a recipe for disaster. PTO people know very well that you can do an awful lot of damage in two minutes. Send emails whilst drunk, for example. This is why PTO people have their own rule: never keep stamps in the house.

David Allen is fatally attached to the concept of the list. He doesn't realise that lists are the number-one cause of heart attacks in western society today.

Lists that read: ?Salad, rice, buy trailing geranium, " raise adrenaline levels only slightly. Lists that read ?Clean bathroom, tidy coat cupboard, find insurance forms, " can produce toxic shock.

Also, David Allen has a strange view of human suffering. Even PTO people can acknowledge that the Getting Things Done philosophy could prove useful in, say, reconstructing civil life in the Balkans after years of warfare. But no. David Allen seems to believe that human suffering occurs chiefly in the workplace. He says: ?The system is most immediately attractive to the people in the most pain. . .

So I work with a lot of mid-to-senior level executives, people who are maybe moving levels within an organisation and finding that their existing systems are being overwhelmed by their new workload."

It is a safe bet that David Allen has never driven around industrial estates on a rainy Tuesday morning, looking for retail outlets that sell carpets, whilst simultaneously discussing the rules of defrosting with their mother. Ah, Mum, I enjoyed it.