It is well worth paying attention to the details as you build your system. You get to design the landscape of your timeline system from the ground up… and you can be strategic about the elements within that landscape.

In this section, we'll focus on:

1. Seeing only what you want to see at any given time – and letting the rest fade away.

This helps with focus.

2. Using visuals and colors that better help your brain identify specific things when you're looking at the bigger picture – and trying to be consistent in your use of those visuals.

Of course, your sense of what is visually pleasing is going to be different to mine. But you can extract the general principle from several things I'm going to lay out.