Brett Kelly over at The Cranking Widgets Blog, just wrote a good piece on Why Most People Don’t Care about GTD.

Like Brett, I love sharing with other people how much the GTD methodologies have changed my life and improved my prodcutivity. Because of this, I used to loan out my GTD books and audio CDs to anyone that seemed to be interested.

I discovered that none of those people read the books or listened to the audio CDs. After a few weeks I would ask for them back, and if they weren’t so disorganized that they couldn’t find them, I would soon loan them back out to somone else. The process would then repeat.

I thought about this and came to the realization that one of the reasons they weren’t taking advantage of the goldmine I had loaned them was because they didn’t have any investment in it. They had nothing at stake. If they didn’t read it or listen to it, they had nothing to lose.

After discovering this, I continued to tell my friends and co-workers about GTD. When someone would express an interest, I would encourage them to go buy the book or audio CDs. Those that made the initial investment in time and money to make the purchase, seemed to be much more likely to apply the GTD methodologies.

I’ve since done the same with other personal productivity materials. When someone tells me that they want to be learn how to come up with creative income ideas, I encourage them to go buy Dan Miller’s 48 Days to Creative Income, instead of loaning them my copy.

Now the only people that I let borrow personal productivity materials are friends that are like-minded–and even then we usually just make a temporary trade so that I can read or listen to something in their library.