Ghosting, Be Gone! Delegate to Keep Your Connections Alive

The arbiters of modern social media seem to hold no act in lower regard than ghosting. A short tour of the internet reveals that failing to respond to another person’s attempt to connect has been described as hurtful, callous, uncaring, and even evil. Yet, ghosting is quite common. This leads to a dilemma: If ghosting is so heinous, how is it possible that people routinely engage in it? Are most people evil?

More to the point: Chances are, you have ghosted someone in the past in some context, professional or personal. Are you evil?

Why people ghost

There is great interest in uncovering the deep motivation behind ghosting. To be sure, some ghosting indeed happens because people want to cut off communication with others and mistakenly assume that having a conversation about it would be worse than simply ignoring them (usually not true). Perhaps a few people ghost because they are truly misanthropic.

But most of the time, the reality is far more mundane than these dramatic characterizations. Consider the following innocuous chain of events:

• Your inbox fills up with emails: potential collaborators, friendly check-ins, follow-ups to attend to.

• Your to-do list is perpetually long. That one email you meant to reply to? It gets shoved to “later.”
• Days, weeks, even months go by. By now it’s been so long that replying starts to feel awkward.

If this process sounds familiar, you are probably not alone. Many people ghost simply as a by-product of being busy and overwhelmed. It’s not that people who ghost others don’t care about them. They just don’t have time to juggle it all.

Why people think people ghost

However, this is not how your ghosting appears to others. While you are experiencing the difficulty of repeatedly trying and failing to get to everything on your to-do list, other people will not give you any leeway.

Both research and common sense suggest that your ghosting will be seen as rude and uncaring by others without an inside perspective into your life. This inference matters because it can cost you opportunities, harm your reputation, and alienate people who might genuinely want to connect with you. It may be unfair, but it is nevertheless costly to let others to see you in this way.

Solutions, practical and impractical

One possibility to solve this issue might be to announce to yourself and to the world that from now on you will be different. Whereas others might struggle to complete their to-do lists, you will be more efficient and effective than them. You will be truly ruthless with your time, and valiantly maximize every moment so that every item on your to-do gets crossed out including all replies due from you to others.

This is inspirational as a goal but likely unrealistic.

Here is a more practical solution: What we cannot fully accomplish ourselves, we can delegate.

There are two broad options for doing so. The high-end option is hiring an executive or personal assistant. Imagine this: Instead of stressing over missed messages, you have a trusted assistant handling your communications. They will make sure no conversation falls through the cracks. They can engage in:

1. Email Triage: Your assistant can sort your inbox, flag the important stuff, and draft thoughtful replies based on your general guidance.
2. Maintaining low-touch or dormant relationships: Your assistant can create a list of important dates: birthdays, anniversaries, or just markers for the amount of time that has passed since you have gotten in touch with personal and professional contacts.
3. Networking Follow-Ups: As a regular practice or after events or conferences, your assistant can handle thank-you notes, follow-ups, and organizing meetings.

If done right, delegation done this way can make you seem superhuman: People will remark that you are always the one who remembers birthdays, follows up on a past conversation, and gets in touch about a business opportunity mentioned in passing during an impromptu conversation.

To be sure, this is a high-end solution, which means that it does not come cheaply. However, you may be in a position where your missed business opportunities may warrant the cost—it’s a question of whether what is left on the table through unintentional ghosting is greater than the cost of an executive assistant.

Relationships Essential Reads

The Art of Talking About Nothing (and Why It’s Everything)

Why We Avoid Those Closest to Us When We Need Them Most

If this does not meet your cost-benefit tradeoff, there’s the low-end option. Here you will build a system of AI and automated solutions that take care of many of the functions of a human assistant.

There are tools that can prioritize important emails for you, suggest responses for you, and even learn your writing style. We are fortunate to have many apps on the market today, and some of the most promising are Super-Human for email, HubSpot for contact management, Calendly for calendar management, and Zapier for automating processes such as sending messages via LinkedIn when certain conditions are met. And, of course, tools such as ChatGPT can help you write messages in your preferred style.

Although this low-end option requires independent research and setting up on your end, once in place its effectiveness may be able to match a human assistant at a fraction of the cost.

A final thought

Although ghosting is often hardly as villainous as social media suggests, it can nevertheless harm your personal relationships and professional reputation. Changing our mindset about ghosting may be helpful—how about this:

To some extent, we are fortunate to be so inundated with social and professional requests. People want to interact with us.

Once we think this way, ghosting becomes a matter of creating a process that allows us to achieve more without stretching ourselves too thinly. Delegation might be the answer. Try it. Your reputation—and your relationships—may thank you.