Pizza Friday #3: Charm bracelets & the office lunch table

our last PFN (Pizza Friday Newsletter) edition of 2024

Dec 20, 2024

Happy Pizza Friday!!! Can you believe that we’ve sent 3 of these in a row? Honestly, we can’t. What we are confident in though, is our commitment to keep increasing the chaos level of the newsletter by 1 point week-over-week. Thank you to Charlotte for recognizing our efforts. (Where do we go from level 10? We’ll see.)

The ~meaning behind the madness~ here is that we’re figuring out this newsletter as we go and trying not to let our perfectionist tendencies stop us from progress. That’s Pizza Friday, baby!!!

This week, before we got ready to *slam our laptops shut until the New Year,* the in-town NYC-based Recess team decided to spend time together at the Haricot Vert Craft Nook and make charm bracelets!!!! We rate the experience an 11 out of 10 for the great vibes, nostalgic garb, and world-class instruction (shout out to Faye). The only point deduction (on the 12 out of 10 scale), was for the amount of stress we encountered learning how to close jump rings with pliers. Luckily Faye helped us all out and our bracelets turned out gorgine.

*there was a dizzying amount of charms to choose from!!!*

*ready to put our fine motor skills to the test*

*thank you Faye for checking (and fixing) our pieces of art*

The Lunch Table

Here at Recess, we have a “weekly” “meeting” because that’s what “businesses” “do.” In the first half of the meeting, we tried to guess the average electricity bill for the residents of Dyker Heights during the month of December. Then when we realized that had nothing to do with Rece$$ Strategic Business Priorities (the money-making arm of Recess), our slightly more work-centered conversation led us to the conclusion that everyone on the call is a staunch supporter of the hour-long work lunch. We collectively (PUN. INTENDED.) agreed that some of our fondest work memories are of being SO silly at the office lunch table, i.e. a place where we went to turn our brains off for a bit, had fun, talked about whatever we wanted, and unsurprisingly, formed some of our deepest work-to-IRL friendships (a mid-day RECESS, if you will??). We also know how much connection, camaraderie, and play influence good work (it’s literally what we do…..*cough* book a Recess retreat *cough*). So at Recess we like to bring a certain ~ lunch table energy ~ to all of our interactions with each other.

Since each of us have also been side-eyed for taking those hour-long work lunches, we’re using our voice (substack) to commit to the bit in defense of them. In the form of creating a new PFN section that may have a recurring role, or may never appear again.

committed to the bit so hard we made a meme

Here’s what we talked about at our metaphorical Lunch Table this week:

Our dear, late friend, Timothy Willis, who we honored this week on the 4-year anniversary of his passing. Timbo was a regular at our Lunch Table during our years together at Warby Parker, and his zest for life is one of the big inspirations behind the formation and evolution of Recess. It’s mocha season, y’all (IYKYK).
2025 Strategic Planning - here are some of our hopes and dreams for the new year that we’re hoping to ~manifest~
- MORE RECE$$: we love the work we do and we want to do more of it (and get paid to do it!!)
- More structures, routines & rhythms to our work, as we navigate what it means to operate as a collective of freelancers
- Expand the Recess collective and continue to build a company that is collaborative and not hierarchical (is this beginning to sound like the start of a cult?)
Our existential dread that stems from being chronically online. We’re vowing to spend more time away from our devices in 2025 and spend more time hanging IRL. The timing of Interstellar’s rerelease on IMAX is NOT a coincidence.

In closing, this feels applicable to both the content of this newsletter and also us, existentially: