My New Year's gift to myself is achieving Inbox Zero. The term means exactly what you think it means. My home inbox is now empty for the first time since the moment before I opened my first account in 1996.

I've tried to get here before. In October 2004, I bookmarked "Is Hitting the Reply Button So Difficult?" The essay was a challenge of sorts – a Los Angeles Times writer asking about the e-mails never returned, and I knew I was the person who had those e-mails sitting around.

Months or, in a few cases, years could pass. I always, always replied if a reply was possible. But the writer had a point: "As the silence goes on, my mind fills with distressing possibilities. Was my tone too curt? Did they read something hostile, but unintended, between the lines? Are they mad at me about something that has nothing to do with the e-mail? Am I boring or annoying them? Should I send another e-mail?"

At the time, I planned to delete that bookmark when I hit Inbox Zero. I've now had the link so long that the article has gone offline, behind a paid Tribune archive wall, been replaced, and come back online again, succumbing to industry ad/pageview pressures. Time to click delete.

Another bookmark came in '05, "Einstein Managed His Inbox Just Like You." Wrote Live Science: "Of Einstein's responses, 53 percent were sent within 10 days. For Darwin, the figure was 63 percent. But now and then they replied months or years later. Einstein begins one reply by explaining that he's just discovered the senders letter of more than a year prior while sifting through 'a mountain of correspondence.' "

I'm proud of how I've gotten to Inbox Zero. Like I said, every e-mail that could have received a reply has received one. Having had this goal for years but only learning of the concept last month, I'm glad I haven't gone the delete route, which others emphasize. That's not me. What I do agree with is this statement from the concept, "You have no control over the world's demands on your time and attention, yet you are the single person who has any choice over how you deal with it."

My "mountain of correspondence" comes to an end — for now — with the last e-mail, one from a friend in June 2004. The letter has been sitting in my inbox every day since then, and I've never known how to respond to it. Or I've never known how to to respond enough. But sometimes, when we wait long enough and then wait too long, we get to a point where we learn something. I've learned the best way to reply to the e-mail isn't going to come in Outlook. Or in this blog.

… How I have lived my life for many years  is a blessing — it's something that I came upon a long time ago — has let me down sometimes but has always made life interesting — I live it out. Everywhere. I try and drink in everything I can and make the most of every day, every person, every potential, every period of life.

… I may have told you this — but I have found that people look at love and life in two ways — you break — and it takes your heart and makes it hard and smaller — it makes you second guess, it knocks the wind out of you. Some people are not the same for a long time. And others — take life and love and its knocks, get knocked over — and their heart takes that experience and grows it that much bigger. I am much more the lattter than the former — I know that things happen for a reason, we are here to teach each other things about ourselves and each other.

… Often, people disappoint us. They leave. They lie. They let us down.  Life is this way. You know this. But the greatest injustice you can do to yourself — and I am not talking about me here — is to not give it a chance and live it — and try out some of those precious things that are sent up along the way for us to feel and do and see. …

I wish it hadn't taken me so long to realize. And I do know that e-mail will come today. In an hour or a day, the inbox count is going to jump from zero to one to a dozen to two. The empty inbox on its own scares the hell out of me, seeing the white space now for the first time. I can't count on a Send/Receive hope, technical but real. But I know now that zero isn't always nothing. Sometimes zero is the best place to begin.

But I lie, I know. Zero sucks. Forget best, can you? It's the only place.

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