NEW year is by definition a new beginning. So it is no surprise that publishers have a gaggle of career and personal-fulfillment books moving into stores.

What is unexpected, however, is the tack taken by many of these books - including one from the man responsible for starting the "Chicken Soup for the Soul" series.

To these authors, putting your life and career in order is no different from tackling a business problem: you figure out the scope of the challenge, break it down into manageable chunks and tackle them one by one. You do this sort of thing successfully at work every day, the authors say, so why shouldn't this approach work for rearranging your personal life?

If you were creating a sales strategy, for example, the first step would be to define the business you're in, writes Robert Michael Fried, a consultant, in "A Marketing Plan for Life: 12 Essential Business Principles to Create Meaning, Happiness and True Success" (Penguin, $15.95). To create a new plan for your personal life, he says, the first step should be similar: "Figure out who you are, and what you want to become."

Step 2 in a marketing plan is to assess the market. Step 2 in creating your life's strategy, Mr. Fried writes, is to "capitalize on your strengths." And so it goes down the line.

With each step, Mr. Fried offers exercises intended to help you clarify your strengths - and to speed you on the way toward the better life you want. To increase your willingness to change, for example, he asks you to list the times when, in retrospect, you were sorry you didn't take a risk.

Brian Tracy, the author of more than 20 books, likes the business metaphor, too. But the department he wants you to study most is strategic planning.

"Companies undertake strategic planning to achieve better results by utilizing their people and resources more effectively," Mr. Tracy writes in "TurboCoach: A Powerful System for Achieving Breakthrough Career Success" (Amacom, $24). "Your goals in personal strategic planning are similar. The key difference is that rather than improving your return on equity, your planning efforts will allow you to realize a greater return on energy. You might say that personal strategic planning will increase your return on life."

The book appears to be geared toward people who are just starting in their careers. In offering tips about how to get more done at work, it advises: "Pick up the pace. At work, develop a sense of urgency and maintain a quicker tempo in all your activities."

Jack Canfield, the co-creator of the "Chicken Soup" series, provides even more tips and a more detailed road map in "The Success Principles" (HarperResource, $24.95), the best of the books now coming to market. The subtitle tells the approach of the book: "How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be."

Mr. Canfield, with an assist from a contributor, Janet Switzer, draws the path clearly. He starts, as most self-help and inspirational gurus do, with the idea that only one person is ultimately responsible for the way your life turns out: you.

"If you want to be successful, you have to take 100 percent responsibility for everything that you experience in your life," he writes. To help you reach goals, he offers 64 principles like "transcend your limiting beliefs" and "you get what you focus on."

Mr. Canfield's advice is straightforward: begin by deciding what you want to accomplish, believe that you can do it and set interim goals you can achieve on the way to your ultimate aim. He also explains the tactics that can be used at each step in the journey.

Having specific goals makes it easier to track progress, he says. Deciding that "I will acknowledge a minimum of six employees for their contribution to the department by Friday at 5 p.m." is far better than just saying "I need to treat my employees better."

Along the way, Mr. Canfield provides inspirational stories about people - some famous and some not - who presumably had harder hills to climb than most readers do. He is relentlessly encouraging and emphatic. For example, if you decide to make a change, he says, you must keep your word.

"Once you make a 100 percent commitment to something, there are no exceptions," he writes. "It's a done deal. Nonnegotiable. Case closed."

Even when the discussion about improving one's life moves to a higher plane, authors have still found a businesslike approach.

In "Moral Courage: Taking Action When Your Values Are Put to the Test" (William Morrow, $24.95), Rushworth M. Kidder, who is president of the Institute for Global Ethics, tells stories of people who did and did not do the right thing. Then, to help readers make the best decisions for themselves, he provides tools including "moral courage checklists" to help weigh the issues on that classic business scale of risk and reward.

Of course, self-improvement is not for everyone. If the thought of trying to become a better person is enough to make you crawl back into bed and pull the covers over your head, don't worry. Publishers have you covered here, as well. Just pick up the self-help parody, "Sloth" (Oxford, $17.95), by Wendy Wasserstein, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. It is one of a series of books - by different authors - pegged to the seven deadly sins.

"Read this book and you will say goodbye to all those naggy desires to better yourself," Ms. Wasserstein writes. "Sloth is the fastest-growing lifestyle movement in the world and that is because it is completely doable. If you embrace sloth, it's the last thing you ever have to do again."

It is certainly much easier than trying to improve your life and career.