Sequence, not scale
Events here are sorted by date and then spaced evenly, so the axis shows order rather than elapsed time. That is a deliberate trade. A to-scale axis is the right choice when the durations between events are the point — a Gantt chart, a geological record — but it is a poor default for the timelines people actually build in a browser, where a single distant date squashes twelve recent ones into an unreadable cluster at one end.
Every event keeps its own date label, so nothing is lost. If elapsed time genuinely matters to your argument, say so in an event's detail line, or split the long gap into its own note.
Using tracks
One line is enough for most timelines and you should stay on one line as long as you can. Add tracks when your events belong to genuinely parallel threads that a reader would otherwise have to untangle: two teams working simultaneously, a product launch alongside the marketing campaign around it, a patient's symptoms alongside their treatments.
Because all tracks share one column order, an event on the lower track lines up with the events it happened alongside — which is the entire reason to use tracks. If two tracks never have anything happening at the same time, they are one track.
What makes a timeline worth reading
Be selective. A timeline with sixty entries is a table with extra steps; the value comes from the ones you left off. A useful rule is that every event should be something a reader could be surprised by, or something later events depend on. Routine occurrences belong in a log.
Write labels as events, not topics. 'Vendor contract signed' places itself in time; 'vendor discussions' does not, and will quietly become a range you cannot draw. Where the date is uncertain, say so in the detail line rather than picking a false precision — 'roughly Q2, from the invoice' is more honest and more useful than a confident wrong day.
Timelines are also one of the best formats for post-incident review, because the argument about what caused what usually dissolves once the order is agreed. Build the timeline before anyone proposes an explanation, and the explanations get better.
Common uses
Project plans and retrospectives, where the timeline records what actually happened rather than what was scheduled. History and literature coursework, where two tracks — events and works — turn a memorization exercise into a comparison. Case histories, incident reviews, hiring processes, legal chronologies: anywhere the sequence is contested or simply hard to hold in your head.
For work that needs status columns rather than dates, a kanban board is the better shape; for planning what to do next rather than recording what happened, try the Eisenhower matrix.