a daily video journal app: three minutes a day

underway is a daily video journal app that interviews you instead of leaving you staring at a camera. once a day, whenever suits you, it asks a few questions out loud, and a few minutes later your answers are an episode, in the order you said them.

once a day, whenever suits you, underway asks you a few questions about your day. a few minutes later, the episode is on your phone. no editing, about three minutes a day. this is what that actually looks like.

the prompt arrives at the same time every day. that consistency is the point: a cue that moves is not a habit, and a weekly alarm is an appointment, and appointments get cancelled. the commitment underneath it is yours, weekdays by default, and the streak is counted against that rather than against the calendar.

you open the app and it says ready for episode 12. before it asks anything it has read what the day turned up, if you have connected the places your day happens: commits, the meeting that overran, the voice note you left at lunch. you tick what this episode is about and drop what it is not. then it proposes an angle, one thread to follow, because a whole day crammed into three minutes is unwatchable.

the questions are asked out loud. a question read off a card gets a performance; a question spoken gets an answer to a person, and the difference is audible in the footage. you answer to camera, one take per question. between answers it listens and decides whether to dig into something specific you named and left unexplained, or move on. it stops after about three minutes of answers, five at the very most, enforced in code, before you run out of things to say.

a few minutes later it has made the episode. answers cut together in the order you said them. nothing reordered, nothing added. filler and long pauses tidied, captions burned in, your name and the episode number on the front, the same title card every episode so the series is recognisably yours. the middle step is a cup of tea.

then it is ready. watch it, drop an answer if you do not want it in, and post it or keep it. the text that goes around it is written for wherever it lands: a thread, a longer first-person post, a caption with hashtags, show notes for the audio version. on founder you post those to your own accounts. one tap to every connected network is series.

each episode's questions start where the last one's answers stopped. the app keeps a private memory of your series, what you are building, what you said you would decide and by when, and you can read, fix or delete everything it remembers. no one else ever sees it.

on the day you cannot face the camera, there are two rescues and neither is the default: one question straight to camera that keeps the chain alive, or a podcast entry with no camera at all, the questions kept in so it sounds like a conversation. a day off from the interview is not a day off from the record.