Async Video Script

A bad async video is worse than the meeting it replaced. Seven minutes of someone clearing their throat, two minutes of actual content, no ask at the end, no deadline — the team watches half of it and the topic still comes back as a meeting. The script is what stops that. Not a teleprompter word-for-word, just enough structure that you sound prepared instead of mid-thought.

Every video follows the same shape — Top, Body, Redirect. The Top is the first ten seconds, where the viewer decides whether to keep watching: what it's about, how it's going, whether they need to do something. The Body is three short sections, capped at thirty seconds each. The Redirect is the call to action with a default — "I'll proceed with Option A unless I hear otherwise by Thursday" — which is what stops the video creating a follow-up meeting. The skill picks the right structure for the video type (status update, decision request, explainer, celebration), so a decision-request script doesn't read like a status update.

There's a word-count check built in. Spoken English runs at about 150 words a minute — a two-minute video is around 300 words, and if the draft is over, the middle sections get cut before the opening or close. Screenshare cues are annotated inline ([SHOW: dashboard]) so you're not fumbling between tabs while recording. For camera-shy users it leans toward screenshare-only and talking-points-on-a-sticky-note rather than full scripts, because reading a teleprompter is the thing that makes async video sound robotic.

It won't help you make a 12-minute monologue. If you've got three topics, you get told to record three videos. The point isn't to produce long, polished content — it's to produce the shortest video that earns the meeting time it saves.