WHO Team Goes To Chinese Area Hit By SARS. World Health Organization (news - web sites) experts were being sent to a crowded province in China where SARS (news - web sites) is spreading fast, while new research published Wednesday suggests the illness is much more deadly than other respiratory diseases. [BioSpace]

U.S. Approves Force In Detaining Possible SARS Carriers. As part of the government's efforts to prevent an epidemic of SARS in the United States, the Bush administration has authorized immigration and customs agents at the nation's international airports to use force to detain arriving passengers who appear to have symptoms of the disease, senior administration officials said. [BioSpace]

Eves denies cuts fuelled SARS [The Globe And Mail: National]

sars update 050703. BBC: "The first detailed study of the spread of the Sars virus in Hong Kong has discovered that the death rate among sufferers was much higher than previously estimated." [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

How Vietnam Halted SARS New York Times by Seth Mydans:

Doctors and nurses clustered around the bed of Nguyen Thi Men when she emerged in mid-March from a nine-day coma, urging her to stay alive. "Breathe, breathe," they said. "Keep trying. Your husband and your children are waiting for you." She heard them and she tried, although she felt as if she were drowning, she said in an interview this weekend at her home.

Who would have thought that one of the most powerful personal knowledge management tools available to us is the simple alphabet.  For a while now I've been using the ideas of David Allen and his Getting Things Done (GTD) process for organising oneself.  His ideas for keeping track of projects, ideas, actions and reference materials is personal knowledge management to the quick.  For me and others has helped to quieten down the background noise of reminders for those things not yet done.

One of the simplest yet most powerful ideas within GTD is the reduction of noise in a personal filing system.  How do you file your own reference materials?  Two parameters drive the system.

1) It must be easy and fun to file materials otherwise you won't

2) It must be easy and fun to find materials otherwise you won't trust the results of step 1.

This is the beauty of the alphabet.  Simply categorise what you have in your hand (and I mean simply), put it in a manilla folder, label it and file it under the first letter of the label.  All in order and quick to retrieve.  When you need something, what you have filed will be on only 1-3 places.  My gas bill will be under G for Gas or T for TXU my supplier.  I can find it quickly and so can my wife if I'm not around.

A complicated system may have had me file my gas bill under Bills -> Home -> Utilities -> Gas.  Far to difficult to recall and far to difficult to initially categorise because I have to keep the categories and their rules in my head.  Hence, nothing gets filed and it all piles up.

I came across the General Reference Filing tip before the book had arrived (Amazon isn't the quickest on postage across the Pacific) and implemented it straight away.  Read the tip a couple of times and buy a labeller.  It makes all the difference.  Scanning consistent and well printed text is much quicker than reading handwriting.  It once took a while to read all the folder labels for my gas bill which were not ordered alphabetically, were handwritten and not always in the same place on each folder.  Just now I found it in under a second.  My filing cabinet is now more useful than the 4-drawer box it was.

This morning I re-organised my Outlook folders the same way.  I now have a Reference Filing file (separate from my mail .pst file) and within it a long list of alphabetically ordered folders.  Within five minutes I had most material refiled under the new system.  That itself shows how quick the filing and retrieval can be.

This afternoon my Palm Pilot is going to get a good re-organisation as well.