It's strange, when you think about it, that the self-help world has adopted the word "zen" to mean "chilled out". As far as I can tell, being a Zen monk is one of the least chilled-out lifestyles imaginable: a punishing schedule of renunciation, early rising, and hour after hour of silent meditation.

Zen parables always seem to involve a senior monk hitting a junior monk with a stick, or even cutting off his fingers, in the quest for enlightenment. (On the humour website McSweeney's, at snipurl.com/1xavd, there's a delightful quiz presenting readers with a list of scenarios and the question: "Zen parable or just someone being cruel?") Yet the books keep coming: The Zen Of Organising, The Everything Zen Book, Zen And The Art Of Making A Living, Zen And The Art of Knitting... Robert Pirsig, author of Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, has a lot to answer for. If I were a Zen monk who had toiled for decades to escape the enslavement of emotions, I'd be bloody furious. If you see what I mean.

Lumped in with all this "pop Zen" you'll find kaizen, a philosophy of "continuous incremental improvement" associated with big Japanese firms, particularly Toyota. In fact, it's American in origin: it was brought to Japanese workplaces by US experts after the second world war. Inevitably, self-development authors have begun co-opting it for their own dark purposes. But unlike most of those "Zen And The Art" books, their outpourings contain some worthwhile ideas.

First, take the "continuous" part. Lurking behind most schemes for life-transformation - especially all that "A New Year, A New You" nonsense that's finally subsiding now February's here - is the unspoken notion that change is something you achieve, once and for all. Since that day never actually arrives, this means living life as a perpetual dress rehearsal for the future point at which you'll have things "sorted out" - or rejecting the idea of change entirely, on the grounds that you'd rather live in the moment and accept yourself. Seeing change as a constant sidesteps this elegantly: you can be happy with who you are, kaizen implies; but who you are is someone constantly changing, hopefully for the better.

Then there's the "incremental" part. Sworn critics of self-help like to point out that real change takes time and is difficult. But what if they're right that it takes time, and wrong about it being difficult? In his book One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way, Robert Maurer suggests taking almost absurdly tiny steps, day after day. Start exercising by marching in front of the TV for one minute daily; resolve to work on a daunting project for two minutes first thing each morning. The point is not that this will be sufficient, on its own, to get fit, or write a novel. Rather, it enables you, in Maurer's words, to "tiptoe past fear": our monkey-brain, it seems, is fooled when we tell it we're embarking only on something minuscule, and it stops putting up resistance. Little and often: perhaps we shouldn't need reminding about this obvious piece of fridge-magnet wisdom, but we do.

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com