Timeline and Milestones Agent Skill

Develop project timelines, milestones, and Gantt charts for grant proposals — mapping aims and tasks to project years, defining go/no-go…

Context cost
1.1k tokensestimated from the bundle, loaded when it triggers
Bundle
1 file · 4.3 kBtext throughout, nothing executable
Licence
not declarednone named by its author
Last change
—no release on file
Servers it uses
Noneruns standalone

What it does

Develop project timelines, milestones, and Gantt charts for grant proposals — mapping aims and tasks to project years, defining go/no-go decision points and deliverables. Use whenever the user mentions timelines, milestones, Gantt charts, project periods, quarters, deliverables schedules, or a reviewer/FOA requires a milestone plan (common for DoD, U-mechanisms, and clinical projects).

What this skill changes about the agent has not been set out here as a list. Its SKILL.md, shown below, says it in the author’s own words.

productivity

The skill itself

A skill is instructions the model reads, so you can see what you are getting: below is the start of its SKILL.md. The front matter loads with every session, the body loads when the skill triggers, and the whole file comes with the install.

SKILL.md4.3 kB · preview
--- name: grant-timeline-milestones ---
6# Timeline and Milestones
7
8A timeline converts the Approach into a feasibility argument: reviewers use it to judge whether the team can actually execute the plan in the project period. Build it from the Approach's per-aim designs, not aspirationally.
9
10Read _agent/project-config.md (project period, mechanism) and the current Approach drafts. The timeline is a figure: rendered file in 02_research_plan/figures/, source in figures/src/, usually embedded near the end of the Approach; if the FOA requires a standalone milestone document, that document lives in 02_research_plan/ as timeline_v<NN>_<date>_<status>.<ext>. Apply _agent/style-profile.md to every sentence of document text, and before delivering drafted or revised prose check it against the profile's *Directives* list item by item, counting any punctuation the profile constrains rather than estimating (shared convention 5).
11
12## Step 1 — Decompose into scheduled units
13
14For each aim, list tasks with duration estimates and dependencies (which tasks are sequential vs parallel, which share personnel or equipment). Include the non-experimental time that plans routinely omit: IRB/IACUC approvals (and DoD HRPO/ACURO second-level review, which adds months), hiring and training, animal colony expansion, equipment procurement, data analysis, and manuscript/report writing.
15
16## Step 2 — Sanity-check the load
17
18Cross-check against the budget's effort allocations: a year in which three aims run heavy experiments simultaneously with 1.2 FTE of staff is a factual inconsistency — report it and help rebalance (stagger aims, adjust scope, or revisit effort). Front-loading everything into years 1–2 and back-loading "analysis and dissemination" is a recognized weak pattern; so is a timeline with no slack for failure and iteration. Start year 1 with the ramp reviewers expect — hiring, approvals, training: heavy experimental milestones in the first two quarters read as naive and undercut the credibility of everything after them. The timeline is where "overambitious" critiques get anchored; a visibly staggered, slack-bearing schedule is the main defense.
19
20## Step 3 — Define milestones, not just bars
21
22Milestones are verifiable events, ideally quantitative: "Aim 1 cohort enrollment complete (n=120), month 18," "Assay validated at CV<15%, month 9." Keep them within the team's control — "manuscript submitted" works, "manuscript accepted" and "hypothesis confirmed" do not; result-contingent branches are decision points, not milestones. For each, define the decision rule where relevant — what happens if missed (the alternative from the pitfalls subsection). DoD and NIH U/cooperative mechanisms often require formal go/no-go milestones; write them so an outside monitor could adjudicate them. For DoD, distinguish milestones (progress markers) from deliverables (items owed to the sponsor — reports, data, prototypes per the SOW) and schedule both.
23
24## Step 4 — Render the Gantt
This is a preview of SKILL.md. Download or install the skill to get the whole thing.
In the file
SKILL.md612 words
Files1
Licencenot declared
Why you can read it

Nothing in a skill executes. The client loads the text and the model follows it, so a skill can be audited the way a runbook is — by reading it.

What it costs in context

Skills are not billed by the call. They are paid for in context: every token the instructions occupy is a token your code, your diff and your conversation cannot use. Here is what this one takes and when it takes it.

≈110
always loaded
The name and description, so the model knows the skill exists and when to reach for it.
965
on trigger
The instruction body, read only when the skill fires.
0.54%
of a 200k window
Ten skills this size would take about 5% of the window before you open a file.
050k100k150k200k context window

1.1k tokens, estimated from the bundle at four bytes to the token, held for the rest of the session once it triggers. Small enough to keep loaded permanently without thinking about it.

Servers bill, skills cost

A server charges by the month. A skill charges once per session, in context, and then keeps charging it for as long as the session lives.

Before and after

The same question, put to the same model twice: once as it comes, and once with these instructions loaded.

No worked example has been published for this skill yet.

The procedure it runs

The procedure has not been set out here step by step. It is in the body of its SKILL.md: the start of it is shown above, and the whole file comes with the install.

Prose, not code

These steps are written for a model to follow, not executed by a runtime. It can still be told to skip one, and it will say so when it does.

Servers it uses

None. This skill calls no MCP servers at all.

Everything it needs is in the instructions, so it works in a project with nothing connected — the model reads the file and changes how it works with what it can already reach.

Its SKILL.md does not declare which tools it asks the agent for, so what it touches is whatever the instructions themselves ask for — read them before you install it.

What it asks for
Writes filesnot declared
Network accessnot declared

This SKILL.md carries no allowed-tools line, so neither is declared. A skill grants no permissions of its own — it can only ask for tools your client already has.

What it will not do

Every skill is narrow, and the useful ones say where they stop. These are the jobs this one is the wrong tool for.

What this skill is not for has not been published here. Nothing is implied by that: it is a section the author has not filled in.

What is in the bundle

1 file, 4.3 kB on disk. A bundle is text throughout: the instructions the model reads, plus the templates it fills in.

  • SKILL.md4.3 kB
What is not in it

No dependencies and nothing executable: a skill is text the agent reads, so the bundle is 1 file you can review in full before installing.

Install

Installing copies the bundle into your project. Nothing runs at install time — the files sit on disk until the model reads them.

# Timeline and Milestones · 1.1k tokens when loaded · macOS, Linux mkdir -p .claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/timeline-and-milestones/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/timeline-and-milestones" ] && { [ ! -e .claude/skills/timeline-and-milestones ] || { mv .claude/skills/timeline-and-milestones "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/timeline-and-milestones" .claude/skills/ && echo "Installed .claude/skills/timeline-and-milestones"
On Windows, or any OS with Node 20+
npx mcprush@latest skill add joshua-d-campbell/timeline-and-milestones

Windows PowerShell says 'running scripts is disabled on this system'? Run Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser RemoteSigned once, or type npx.cmd instead of npx (codex.cmd, gemini.cmd, grok.cmd likewise). PowerShell 7 needs neither. Writes to .claude/skills/timeline-and-milestones/ in the current project. For every project instead, run mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/timeline-and-milestones/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/timeline-and-milestones" ] && { [ ! -e ~/.claude/skills/timeline-and-milestones ] || { mv ~/.claude/skills/timeline-and-milestones "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/timeline-and-milestones" ~/.claude/skills/ && echo "Installed ~/.claude/skills/timeline-and-milestones" (macOS, Linux) — or add --global to the npx line. The curl line replaces .claude/skills/timeline-and-milestones/ only after the download succeeds, so files left there by another skill of the same name, or by an older release, do not mix in. A copy already there is moved aside, not deleted, and the line prints where. It appears as grant-timeline-milestones in Gemini CLI, Codex, Copilot and Grok (its own name); Claude Code lists it by the folder name, timeline-and-milestones.

Which clients pick it up on their own

A skill is a folder of text. Most of these read a skills folder and pick it up without being told; the rest take the same folder another way — an upload in the app, a parameter on an API call — and then choose it by its description just the same.

Claude Code.claude/skills/
Claude DesktopCustomize › Skills
ChatGPTSkills › Create › Upload
Cursor.cursor/skills/
VS Code.github/skills/
Codex CLI.agents/skills/
Gemini CLI.gemini/skills/
Grok Build.grok/skills/
Microsoft CopilotSkills › Upload a skill
PerplexityComputer › Skills › Upload a skill
DeepSeek Harness.dsh/skills/
Zed.agents/skills/
Devin Desktop.devin/skills/
Windsurf (legacy).windsurf/skills/
OpenAI Agents SDKInstructions or sandbox Skills
HTTP / APIa request parameter
This release
Versionnot versioned
Publishedno release date on file
PriceFree
Referencejoshua-d-campbell/timeline-and-milestones

Versions

Its author publishes no version number, so there is nothing here to pin to: what you install is the folder as it stands today. Instructions change more often than APIs do — a skill can be rewritten entirely without anything it depends on moving.

Pinning

Nothing to pin to: this skill carries no version number of its own. What you install is what the folder holds on the day you install it.

Reviews

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