What to Do
Build the timeline in UTC from independent sources, recording each source’s clock offset. Build the link chart from documented relationships, not from proximity. Mark every gap in the sequence as a gap, not as a smooth line.
How It Fails
The tidy narrative. Clock skew, time zone errors and a single log source produce a sequence that feels causal and is not. Adjacency on a chart is not a relationship.
Check
- All times normalized to UTC with offsets recorded
- Two or more independent sources per critical event
- Gaps drawn as gaps
- Every link on the chart has a document behind it