New Year's resolutions hurt my brain. Apparently, about 4000 years ago somewhere in ancient Babylon someone felt the need to offer up some extra promises to the gods in order to kick off the new year as all good god-fearing Babylonians should. Since then, us rational folks have realized that the new year has a whole lot less to do with the wills of the gods and a whole lot more to do with the rotation of the Earth.So that's it, right? No more promises to gods, no more New Year's resolutions. Piece of cake. If only we were so lucky.

Society has deemed it necessary to perpetuate this tradition, which has proven ineffective at everything other than selling short-lived gym memberships, into the modern day. Whoo-hoo. The biggest problem I have with New Year's resolutions isn't that people want to change, but rather the method by which they go about doing so. People are simple. If you maintain all of the inputs going into your life, you will inevitably yield the same output. It's like spraying a mirror with water and expecting it to shatter. Yeah, maybe it isn't unreasonable the first time, but after you've tried to shatter that mirror with water so many times, wouldn't it make sense to go pick up a rock and break the freaking mirror? Of course not.

You bought your gym membership and went for the first two weeks of January, only to find yourself back on the couch picking Cheetos dust out of the T-shirt you've been wearing for the last three days. The idea of a New Year's resolution in itself is a pretty good one, but only if you take the whole new year part out -- and the resolution part. That, too.

Review and change are essential parts to living a fulfilling life. By putting off any reason to change until the new year, you make it unrealistic that you'll be able to maintain any resolutions which you eventually try to make. The problem with resolutions as a whole is that they're essentially a wish for change in your life. I've found better luck with wishing on fairy dust than with making resolutions. There is only one way to make significant, long term and lasting improvements in your life, and that is by making systemic changes. Like I said: people are simple. A year is a timescale which people can barely comprehend, let alone plan for or reflect upon in any meaningful way.

Hopefully, at this point I've converted you into a New Year's resolution denier. That being said, goals remain an important thing to set in order to grow as a person. Here, we reach an impasse. We have no goal setting system with which we can reasonably work, and we have rejected the one which society has provided us.

There is an alternative. The system which works best for me -- although there are many goal setting systems -- is a process of goal setting, systemic change and review which occur on approximately a monthly (or quarterly) cycle. For example, if I were struggling with my grades in the month of February, on Feb. 28 during my regular review I would sit down and write out how I had allocated my time for that month (e.g. hours allocated to friends, dating, video games, exercise, study, family, etc.), and go about reallocating my time appropriately in my scheduling application. On March 31. I would review how my grades had changed, which of the changes I had made to my routine worked and which ones didn't, and decide what changes needed to be made for next month. In this way, you do not operate on wanting to improve your life, or on fleeting feelings of a need to change.

In short, I hate New Year's resolutions as a vector for change because they are an ineffective waste of time. We should think about our lives and change them using systems because that way our vaguely better-than-monkey brains have a harder time getting us back on that couch, picking Cheetos dust out of our shirts.

Inspiration for this article comes from CGP Grey, who produces short educational videos, as well as two podcasts -- Hello Internet and Cortex -- which can be found on the iTunes store or your podcasting client of choice.