A marker system that still makes sense three months in

Markers start useful. Someone flags a fix, someone else notes a music cue, you mark a moment to revisit. Three months later there are two hundred of them in seven colours and no record of what any colour meant.

At that point they stop being navigation and become noise, and people start ignoring them — which is worse than not having them, because genuine notes get lost among the dead ones.

The fix is a small fixed vocabulary, written down, and a habit of deleting.

A working set:

• Red — must fix before delivery. A blocker.
• Yellow — question for someone else. Needs an answer, not work.
• Green — approved, locked, do not touch.
• Blue — audio or music.
• Purple — visual effects or graphics.

Five is enough to be useful and few enough to remember without a chart. Adding a sixth for a special case is how the system decays; put the special case in the marker's text instead.

'Audio issue' tells the next reader nothing. 'Boom shadow top left, needs paint or reframe' tells them what to do and roughly how long it takes.

Include who raised it where more than one person works on the timeline. A note whose author is unknown cannot be questioned, so it either gets done unnecessarily or ignored.

Keep it to one line. Markers are read in a list, and a paragraph in a marker is a paragraph nobody reads.

The temptation is to turn a fixed item green rather than remove it, as a record. The result is a timeline where most markers are done and the live ones are hidden among them.

Delete on completion. If a record is genuinely needed, it belongs in a document, not on the timeline.

Then the marker list has a useful property: its length is the amount of work left. That single fact makes it worth opening, which is what keeps the system alive.

Feedback from a review is a different kind of item: it has come from outside, it may need discussion, and it must be visibly resolved.

Give it a dedicated colour and work through it as a batch rather than mixing it into ongoing notes. When the pass is done, clear the colour entirely — an empty review colour is a clear signal that the round is complete.

Keep the original feedback message somewhere too. Markers compress a note to one line, and occasionally the nuance in the original matters.

Put the key in a text file in the project folder, or in a marker at frame one of the timeline. Five lines.

Without it, a colleague inherits a coloured timeline and no legend, and their reasonable response is to invent their own convention alongside yours.

This costs a minute at the start of a project and is the difference between a system and a habit that only works while one person is present.