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Documentation/Timeline

Timeline

A chronological record of every event in your workspace

Overview

The Timeline provides a chronological view of every significant event in your IdeaLift workspace. Every idea captured, every decision made, every status change, and every push to your issue tracker appears here in order. It is the single source of truth for understanding what happened and when.

Use the Timeline to review your team's activity, trace the history of a specific idea, or prepare reports for stakeholders who want to understand how customer feedback flows through your product process.

Timeline View

The Timeline displays events as a vertical feed, with the most recent activity at the top. Each event card includes:

Event type

A colored indicator and label showing what happened (captured, approved, shipped, etc.)

Idea details

The idea title and a snippet of the original feedback, with a link to the full idea

Actor

Who performed the action (team member name or "System" for automated events)

Timestamp

When the event occurred, displayed as relative time (e.g., "2 hours ago") with the exact date on hover

Filtering by Date Range

Use the date range picker at the top of the Timeline to focus on a specific period. Quick presets make it easy to jump to common ranges.

Today
Last 7 days
Last 30 days
This quarter
Last quarter
Custom range

The custom range picker lets you select any start and end date. This is useful for generating reports that align with your planning cycles.

Event Types

Filter the Timeline by event type to focus on specific kinds of activity. Each event type has a distinct color for quick visual scanning.

Capture— A new idea was captured from any source
Decision— An idea was approved, rejected, or deferred
Push— An idea was pushed to an issue tracker (GitHub, Linear, Jira)
Status change— An idea moved between statuses (e.g., in progress to shipped)
Merge— Two or more ideas were merged into one
Tag / categorize— Tags, categories, or product areas were added or changed
Comment— A team member added a note or comment to an idea

You can select multiple event types simultaneously to create a combined view.

Exporting Timeline Data

Export your timeline data for reporting, compliance, or analysis in external tools. The export respects your current filters, so you can export exactly the slice of activity you need.

CSV export

Download a spreadsheet with all events, timestamps, actors, and idea details

JSON export

Machine-readable format for integration with BI tools or custom dashboards

Export fields

Each exported record includes:

  • Event timestamp (ISO 8601)
  • Event type
  • Idea title and ID
  • Actor (team member who performed the action)
  • Source (where the idea originated)
  • Decision reason (if applicable)
  • Linked ticket URL (if pushed to an issue tracker)

Best Practices

  • Use the Timeline before quarterly planning to review the full history of decisions and their outcomes.
  • Filter by "Decision" events to quickly build a log of all product decisions for stakeholder reports.
  • Export last quarter's timeline as CSV and share it with leadership to demonstrate how feedback drives your roadmap.
  • Combine event type filters with date ranges to answer specific questions, like "How many ideas did we ship in January?"
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