The weekly status meeting is one of the most expensive habits in modern work. You pull five to ten people off their deep work, spend thirty minutes going around the room — "I worked on X, next week I'll do Y" — and then everyone goes back to their desks having learned very little they couldn't have read in a Slack message.
A growing number of teams are replacing this ritual with something simpler: a short screen recording, shared async, watched on your own time.
Written status updates are easy to skim and easy to ignore. A two-minute video is harder to dismiss — you see someone's screen, hear their voice, and absorb context that text strips away. You understand not just what they did but how they thought about it.
There's also something about seeing the actual work — a dashboard, a design, a terminal — that makes progress feel real in a way that bullet points don't.
The best async video updates are short and structured. A reliable format:
Two minutes total. Most people find they communicate more in two recorded minutes than in ten minutes of a live meeting.
You don't need to cancel your standing meeting cold. Try this: for two weeks, ask everyone to record a two-minute update before the meeting and share it. Then run the meeting as a Q&A only — no status updates, just questions on what people watched.
Most teams find that meeting shrinks to fifteen minutes or gets cancelled entirely.
You don't need Loom or any paid software to do this. Record Your Screen Free works in your browser — hit record, share your screen, talk for two minutes, stop, download, share. No account, no subscription, no friction.