Technology like the ever-popular FitBit has made physical health and fitness a whole lot easier to monitor and achieve. Many of us now wear these devices to automatically track our heart rate, stress level, number of steps, and even the quality of our sleep.

Now, imagine manually tracking each of those data points at the end of every week. It would be nearly impossible.

So, what’s the comparable scenario in the legal industry? There’s one thing that’s guaranteed to increase billable hours, reduce stress, and make your law practice healthier: releasing your billable time on a daily basis.

Sadly, the archaic timekeeping software many of us currently use makes tracking billable time such a headache that we often have no choice but to wait until the end of the week (or worse, end of the month) to release our time. After all, when a six-minute email takes just as long to log as it does to draft, what’s the point of doing it contemporaneously?

This lack of innovation is preventing the majority of lawyers, despite our every effort and desire, to get into a daily routine of releasing time. Did you know they estimate that humans can only accurately remember 23% of the work they did after six days have passed? That means that if you completed your timesheet daily, you would double your accuracy, cut the time you spend tracking your hours in half, and increase your billables by 20%.

Now that’s a healthier practice.

What’s most puzzling is not that lawyers don’t track their time daily (I never did), but rather that firms are complicit in allowing this bad habit to persist. If firms did nothing but change their weekly time release policy to a daily policy, they would increase collections by an average of $52,000 per lawyer per year.

Some firms dock bonuses or withhold billable hours for not complying with timekeeping policies. However, punitive action isn’t the answer. Instead, firms should be positively reinforcing good (healthy) behavior, just as we do in other aspects of our lives.

So, what’s the best way for firms to encourage healthier timekeeping?

Empower lawyers with technology that removes friction from timekeeping and facilitates daily time release. Time should be releasable both in the office and on mobile devices, and notifications should be optimized to appear when the lawyer is most likely to release his or her time. In today’s digital age, these technologies exist. It’s simply a matter of getting more lawyers and law firms to take advantage of them.

As the new year fast approaches, many of us are busy making resolutions to eat healthy and exercise every day. I say we apply the same resolutions to our law practices.

It’s time to ask Santa (or the CIO of your firm) to get you that Fitbit for lawyers, so you can be on your way to a healthier practice in the new year.