I haven't yet felt the need, in this column, to praise Stephen Covey, author of the famous The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People. It's one of those hopelessly unrealistic books that insists you begin your journey to fulfilment by Discovering Your Values and Finding Your Life Purpose - a process which, it's implied, will take a few days of slogging through several grim chapters of homework-style exercises. But a few days is both too long (who's got a few days to spare?) and too short: surely discovering your "life purpose" takes your whole life. I finally lost respect for Covey when he decided there was an Eighth Habit, requiring a new book. Who's to say there won't be a ninth, 10th, 11th? I'm no maths expert, but I'm guessing the possibilities are, well, infinite.

But Covey's obsession with values leads him to one key insight, and it's all in that word "effective". People sometimes misremember the title as The 7 Habits Of Highly Efficient People, but there's a reason why it's not called that. Covey recognises there's no point being really good at doing stuff - highly efficient, in other words - if it's not the right stuff. Efficiency isn't the same as effectiveness. Work is probably where we misunderstand this the most. A day when lots gets done feels like a day well spent, regardless of what got done, and few companies avoid "presenteeism", where just being at your desk looking busy is rewarded. (Almost every time-management book falls into the trap of assuming that whatever you're doing is worth doing, and just needs doing more efficiently.) But there's "busywork" in our personal lives, too, whenever the volume of activity becomes a stand-in for its value: what else is speed-dating, or pushing your kids into doing 25 extracurricular activities, or a frenetic social life based on keeping in touch with as many people as possible?

The scariest part - for an inveterate list-maker like me - came in Paul Graham's essay, Good And Bad Procrastination (one of a collection, worth browsing, at paulgraham.com). Graham identifies "type-B procrastination": not inactivity, but unimportant busy‑ness. "Any advice about procrastination that concentrates on crossing things off your to-do list is not only incomplete, but positively misleading, if it doesn't consider the possibility that the to-do list is itself a form of type-B procrastination," he writes. It's still procrastination, he points out, to do a lot of pointless tasks just because it feels nice to cross them off the list, while the big, difficult thing - the one that matters - goes undone. I recognised myself, and felt caught red-handed.

Of course, our lives are full of duties we don't find fulfilling but cannot just abandon in favour of more "important" things. One popular piece of advice is to spend even just five minutes each day on one important thing, before the urgent stuff takes over. Increasingly, little tricks like this strike me as far more useful than grand philosophies of happiness. Meanwhile, if you find my life purpose, please get in touch.

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com