Bookmarks as choreography, not decoration

Bookmark-heavy reports often accumulate invisible state: a hidden slicer moved three releases ago still filters half the visuals. We ask cohorts to draw a state machine on paper before touching Desktop. If the diagram looks like spaghetti, the report will feel like spaghetti to stakeholders.

We limit primary bookmark groups to five states per page. Anything beyond that gets split into another page with a deliberate handoff note. The constraint forces editors to choose which decisions belong together, which is the real design problem.

During live rehearsals, we time transitions. Anything longer than two seconds without narration loses the room. That metric pushes teams to simplify visuals instead of stacking more bookmarks to compensate.