Try the new event timeline generator

The most requested thing I have ever given away was an event timeline builder. More than 700 of you used it, and people still DM me about it more than a year later.

In May last year I wrote about where it fell short, and what would have to change before AI could really plan an event. What I said then:

Several years away. That was fifteen months ago.

Three things changed in the meantime, and none of them got much of an announcement.

Context windows got big enough to hold your event. You can now drop a forty-page venue contract, last year's timeline and a year of vendor email into one conversation and have all of it stay in play. When I built the original, you were summarising documents before you could use them, which defeated the point.

Every platform built a place to store prompts. Projects in ChatGPT and Claude, Gems and NotebookLM in Gemini, Agents in Copilot. That is the "maintain context across multiple conversations" line, shipped.

Models got good enough to run an interview. The old version asked its questions and produced a template regardless of your answers. This one holds a line of questioning, does date arithmetic, and can show you, and pushes back when the answer does not work.

So I rebuilt it for you to use on any AI platform, not just ChatGPT.

Start here, and check which account you are in

This tool works by reading your real documents. Venue contracts, client briefs, budgets, vendor threads. That is the whole point of it, and it is also the reason to spend thirty seconds on this before you upload anything.

Use the account your company pays for, not your personal one. The paid work versions of ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot and Gemini sit under your employer's agreement, and what you put into them is not used to train anybody's model. A free or personal account is a different product with different terms. Uploading a signed client contract into your personal ChatGPT is the kind of thing that is fine right up until it is a conversation with your legal team.

If you are not sure which one you are logged into, that is worth resolving before you upload a client document rather than after. Your IT team will know in about a minute.

If you are on a personal account anyway, turn training off first. In Claude that is Settings, then Privacy, then switch off "Help improve our AI models." It is on by default. The other three have an equivalent setting in the same neighbourhood.

And check what the client contract says. Plenty of enterprise clients write in that their information cannot go into an AI tool at all, and some require you to work inside a closed instance. Agency owners raise this with me constantly, and it is the real reason enterprise event teams have moved slower on AI than everyone assumes. Redact first, or use the tool the client has already approved.

The big change

The old version interviewed you. This one reads first.

You drop in your venue contract, last year's timeline, the brief, whatever rough notes are sitting in the folder. You do not tidy any of it up. It reads the lot, tells you what it found so you can correct it, and only asks about what it could not find.

That reads like a convenience feature, but it is the difference between a template and a plan.

Every generic timeline tool guesses at your room block cutoff. It uses an industry average, calls it 21 to 30 days, and moves on. Your actual cutoff is written in your venue contract, along with your F&B guarantee, your attrition threshold, your COI deadline and the exact date your cancellation penalty steps up.

Those are the only deadlines that can actually sink an event, and they are sitting in a PDF you already own.

If you upload one document, upload the venue contract.

What it gives you back

A dated workback schedule from save-the-date through load-out, with the week, the real calendar date, an owner and a category on every row. It pastes straight into Excel or Sheets.

An owner on every task, including the vendors. A task owned by nobody is a task nobody does, and the vendor who goes quiet in month three is the one that sinks the schedule, so vendors get named the same way people do.

A second table of the dates that cannot move, taken from your contract where you gave it one and from standard practice where you did not.

A list of what is still unassigned and the three things to do this week.

The part people are not expecting

It will argue with you.

If your dates are too tight, it does not quietly shave two weeks off print production to make the plan fit on the page. It tells you the BEO deadline passed three weeks ago, says how far past it you are, and gives you the three real options: move the event, cut scope, or pay rush fees. It will tell you which one it would pick.

If you brush past that, it raises it again. It keeps raising it until you either fix it or say outright that you accept the risk.

This is the behaviour I most wanted and the hardest to get. Every model wants to be agreeable. A timeline that agrees with you about an impossible schedule is worse than no timeline, because now you have a document that says everything is fine.

What it does not do

Being straight about this, because a tool that claims everything is a tool you stop trusting on the first thing it gets wrong.

It does not know your venue. Unless you upload the contract, every hard date is an industry average and your property may differ.

It does not know real vendor availability, current pricing, or whether your preferred AV company is already booked that week.

Judgment stays yours. Nothing here knows that the CEO hates being scheduled before 10am, or that this client's procurement takes six weeks rather than two. That is what the documents you upload are for.

And it does not do permits. Requirements vary by city and sometimes by block. Ask a human.

Running it in your AI

It is plain text, so it works anywhere. Paste it into ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot or Gemini and it behaves the same.

If you want it to stop forgetting between sessions, each platform has a saved space and each one named it differently. Projects in ChatGPT and Claude. Gems attached to a NotebookLM notebook in Gemini. Notebooks in Copilot, which has an advantage most event teams overlook: if your files live in SharePoint and Teams already, it reads them where they sit and you upload nothing.

The folder has the setup steps for all four.

Get it

Four files. Read the first one, paste the second, ignore the rest until you want them.

The Event Timeline Toolkit →

Grace Wu used the first version to plan an event back in April. Afterward, she wrote:

Five days ago, in the middle of planning the next one, she emailed to say she is using it again. That’s the only test that matters - not whether the output looks impressive, but that it’s repeatedly saving event planners time.

Till next time,

Noah

Do More With Less Using AI

PS: If your team is trying to work out which of your workflows is worth building first, rather than which prompt to paste, reply to this email and tell me what you are stuck on.