A week before his birthday, Nathan sat down to enjoy breakfast and nonchalantly mentioned, “I really like the turtles.”
That was it. That was his whole story. It wasn’t a masterclass in project scoping for freelancers, but it was his proclamation for the day.
To be fair, he’s not quite ten years old and was about to scarf down a short stack of pancakes before running to catch the bus to school. You can’t really hold the quality of his project brief against him.
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Everyone has that aunt. You know the one. She still has a rotary phone hanging on her kitchen wall – not ironically, not as décor, just because it works. And right next to it, a notepad. Notes from long friendly phone conversations. Who she should call back. Errands she needs to run. People she wants to send a letter – yes, a letter, with an envelope and a stamp. Everything written down, orderly, a list with no real order, but crossed off when done. She’s not particularly tech-savvy. She’s not type-A. She just figured out a long time ago that a good day doesn’t happen on its own. It has to be organized into existence.
She has never worked remotely. She has never managed a distributed team. But if she had, she would have been very good at it. Not that she would tell you so, you just know it.
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The Creative Mornings theme for May was Create, and the local speaker was Giovannie Dixon – LA-born Jamaican-American artist, muralist, and about as self-taught as it gets. The early morning chat took place at Ignite Sparked by BBB in downtown Phoenix – comfortable, bright, built for entrepreneurs and the people who think like them. It’s the kind of place that makes you want to get busy immediately. Maybe start a podcast. Enter the co-working vs cubicle debate. Question business “truths” more this week than you did last week.
That last one turned out to be more relevant than I expected.
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It’s Tuesday evening, and your actual work is waiting. The kind that has your name on it, the kind that moves things forward. But instead of doing that work, you’re rewriting a job description for a freelance project manager you need next month. You’ve already rewritten it twice. You’re not sure it’s right. You post it anyway, to three different places, because that’s what the freelance hiring process has become: yours to manage, yours to run, yours to finish when everything’s done. So you do.
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I’m betting there is a pot of coffee in your break room right now.
Maybe it is fresh. Maybe it has been sitting on the burner since before the morning standup and some well-intentioned co-worker keeps meaning to make a new pot but the day keeps happening. Either way, it’s there. It’s always there. Because that is what coffee does – it’s reliable. It fuels the team; it absorbs whatever the morning throws at it – but it also gets burned sometimes and overflows other times. Frequently, it just ends up empty.
Your core team is that coffee. Not because they grind – although I’m sure they do – but because they’re there. They’re showing up day after day.
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There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that sets in at week five of any project that was planned – and budgeted – for three. It’s not dramatic. It doesn’t announce itself. It just settles in quietly – in the fourth rescheduled deadline, the apologetic client email you draft and redraft, the Sunday afternoon you spend doing the work that Friday afternoon was supposed to hold. You’re not failing. You’re just running a marathon that started as a sprint, but kept getting longer while you continued running it – and doing it without the freelance talent support that could have made all the difference.
Most people push through. They redistribute the load, lean into the team, ask too much of the people who can least afford to give more, and eventually deliver something that’s good enough but not what it was supposed to be. Then they take a breath, declare it a win, and quietly file the whole experience under “that was rough” – without ever stopping to ask why it had to be rough in the first place.
That question, “why?” is worth asking. Because the answer, almost every time, is the same: there wasn’t enough flexible talent support in the room when the walls started closing in.
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You’ve been there. You sent the message, made the comment, delivered the feedback – and then watched the other person’s face do that thing. The slight furrow. The pause that lasts just a beat too long. Or worse, the silence that stretches across a chat thread like tumbleweed through a ghost town.
You meant well. You always mean well. But somewhere between your brain and their inbox, something got lost in translation.
Welcome to the gap between intent and impact – one of the most underappreciated, quietly destructive forces in the modern workplace. It doesn’t make headlines. It doesn’t show up in quarterly reviews. But it chips away at trust, collaboration, and morale in ways that are very real and surprisingly expensive.
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A quick introduction before we dive in to discuss the Creative Mornings Phoenix event – I’m Chris, part of the leadership team at FlexTal. If you’ve visited our blog before, you know our content typically lives in the world of workforce strategy, flexible talent, and the future of how companies get work done. All important stuff. But our digital team has been nudging me for a while, asking me to take over the feed every now and then and share something a little more personal – so welcome to The Back Burner, where I’ll surface the ideas, observations, and occasional rabbit holes that don’t always make it into the main feed. Personal ramblings from someone who has spent 25+ years working as a freelancer, but who’s also logged his fair share of time in corporate cubicles.
So here I am. Fair warning: these posts may occasionally involve things like corporate events and musings about workforce solutions, but more than likely I’ll end up in rabbit-holes on ideas that have little or nothing to do with staffing models or hiring decisions – think of this space as a blank canvas to have you join in on the conversations I have with myself when I’m stuck in the desert, bumper-to-bumper, on I-10 during my commute.
This is one of those.
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There’s a particular kind of chaos that sets in around day three of managing a remotely distributed team.
You ping your designer in Istanbul at 8 AM your time. She’s already wrapped up for the day. Your developer in Portland won’t be online for another four hours. Your content strategist in Austin just sent eleven voice memos – all of them important, none of them short. And you’re sitting there, the supposed orchestrator of this whole operation, wondering how anyone gets anything done when everyone’s clocks are pointing in different directions.
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There’s a particular kind of organizational dysfunction that doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t show up in a boardroom slidedeck or trigger a crisis meeting. It moves quietly – through the organization, through the people, through the work – until one day you look around and realize that your best people are exhausted, your timelines have gotten optimistic in a way that no longer means anything, and the quality of output has drifted just enough that you’ve started wincing at things you used to feel proud of.
This is what hitting core team capacity actually looks like. It’s an invisible ceiling – an unseen, but all too real cap on capacity. Not a dramatic meltdown. A slow, grinding erosion.
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