What is the 88 Day Planner?
Mission: To help you make your vision a reality, with a customized physical planner.
The 88 Day Planner is a customized physical productivity planner. Each daily page uses established productivity practices: batched lists, dedicated Flow State session blocks, a daily why and vision, and Daily Wins. Each week finishes with a weekly review. Every planner is customized before printing: start on any Monday; sun times based on the owner’s location — dawn, sunrise, high noon, sunset, and dusk; moon times for that location; any cover and font colors; date format US or Global. Carefully selected quotes are drawn from a pool and shuffled per planner, so quotes appear in a unique order.
How the 88 Day Planner started
I'm Jonesy. Before I turned 40 I worked a series of corporate roles: accounting, banking, sustainability manager, then general manager of a sales team. The sustainability manager job was the one that forced me to look into productivity. The scope of that role cut across almost every part of the business, and initially I had no one reporting to me. The workload was huge, so I read a number of productivity books to learn how to be more effective with my time. The sales manager role likewise forced me to read sales books.
When I turned 40 I decided it was now or never. I resigned and started working for myself. Overnight I had the same challenge: a million things to do, sales calls to make, and only one working day. I began printing a daily template each morning to plan and structure my day based on the best ideas from the productivity and sales books that I had read: writing out the vision, batching calls, sales call quotas, context-based lists, blocking out time for flow state sessions, watching the sunrise, consciously reflecting on the day, and so on.
Even though I had an online Customer Relationship Manager application, I found it faster and more productive to make calls off a written list when in 'sales call mode', and after a call I often wanted to quickly schedule a future follow up call for myself. So that I could be more organized, I bought a binding machine and started making myself monthly planners. The last page of every planner was for “Planner Improvement Ideas” and each new planner I would iterate to improve the planner format.
That is still the model: digital tools for the detail, paper for planning. See Why use a physical planner when I already have a calendar and other apps?.
After about a year of using monthly planners the overhead of creating the planners became obvious. Some months I wouldn’t have made my planner until I was already a week or more into the new month because creating, printing and binding the planner took a couple of hours and I would delay that work if I was busy by temporarily using the notes pages. To reduce this frequent overhead, I experimented with longer time periods: four-month versions, and then three months. Three months (approximately 88 days) turned out to be the sweet spot: long enough to make progress and short enough to maintain urgency and focus.
At the start of this year (2026) I was at the crossroads. To get organized I naturally created a new planner for myself by pulling sun times, running a mail merge, and reviewing the “Planner Improvement Ideas” page from my previous planner. As I was preparing my first 2026 planner, I had the epiphany that other people need my planner, and from that point on I embarked on a project to automate the customization of the 88 Day Planner.
I am now proud to say that anyone can have their own 88 Day Planner with customized cover and font colors, start date, date format, sun times — dawn, sunrise, high noon, sunset, and dusk — and moon times for the owner’s location to get more organized and more focused.