The importance of incident timelines cannot be overstated, as they provide valuable insights into what happened during an incident and allow teams to learn from their mistakes. To effectively use an incident timeline, it's essential to ensure its accuracy and usefulness by constructing a story around the key events that occurred, getting everyone on the same page, identifying key discussion points, and ensuring that all stakeholders are kept up-to-date with relevant information. A useful timeline should tell a story backed by an audit trail, capture all events, including gaps in activity, and be a living document that can be extended during a debrief to find new insights. By creating a thorough and accurate incident timeline, teams can maximize their learnings from incidents and improve their response to future events.