There are a couple of key features involved in this makeover. First is the utter simplicity of the product: if you ever did those “fill in the bubble with a No. 2 pencil” tests in school, you can use the BubbleTimer timesheet (and without getting graphite dust on your fingers, too). After you set up your activities, you just click to record time in 15-minute intervals.

The second useful thing here is goal tracking. For any activity, you can set a desired maximum or minimum time as a daily goal: “I want to watch TV no more than 90 minutes each day” or “I should be working on the squidbot project at least five hours a day.” As you bubble in your time, the system tracks how you’re doing on these goals; easy popup graphs give you a daily and weekly report on your progress (or lack of it).

You can also print out a more traditional tracking report if you want to use BubbleTimer to track, say, billable hours. But I suspect the product will be less used by those who want to track time back to clients (we mostly already have some solution in place) and more by those who want a watchdog on lifestyle change efforts. To make that even more effective, you can share selected times with others: imagine having your best friend able to see how long you spent watching anime every day.

BubbleTimer is free to try for up to 14 days, and $20 per year after that.

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What’s interesting about this 4 1/2 day scheme, though, is not the choice of 36 hours as the appropriate length of the work week for a programming and product development team. The real novelty lies in how they structure their week: not all days are created equal.

At Particletree, they spend Monday through Thursday working on their products – and nothing but their products. Controversial and unscheduled topics get pushed off. The goal is to accomplish 5 (inefficient) days’ worth of work in 4 highly-focused days.

Then, when Friday comes around, they work a half day starting in the afternoon – and at someone’s home, rather than the office. What’s on tap for those Fridays? It’s a mixed list:

• Bonding
• Discussions of company business
• Thanks to customers
• Meeting people

In other words, their Fridays are set aside for things that are a change of pace from the regular work week – and that work better as large chunks of time than as interruptions that sidetrack writing code. This strikes me as a very smart move; recognizing the potential for this sort of organization is rare.

Is there something here that you can apply to your own web working career? It’s possible that you already have! Mondays, for me, are all about email and other written word catchup, and I deliberately avoid scheduling software deadlines on Mondays; I know from experience that I won’t get much (if any) coding done just as I’ve come back from a weekend.

Does your work week lend itself to this sort of scheduling, regardless of how long it is? Are there things that are better handled in big chunks, rather than as interruptions? It’s worth taking a few minutes to step back and ask yourself whether you’d benefit from a work week where every day was not just a carbon copy of every other.

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• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks