Write and revise in less time: Separate problems and tasks

Whether you’re working on a difficult draft or revising in response to reviewer comments, revision can feel overwhelming at the best of times. Any review of any manuscript will typically reveal hundreds of opportunities for improvement, from tiny tweaks to the wording and figures to fundamental holes in your theoretical framing.

Most early-career business profs respond to this necessary work in one of two ways: they either dive in way too quickly (“Let me just start fixing things as I see them”), or they stall out completely (“I don’t even know where to begin”). Neither approach produces a strong submission.

What does work is revising your draft systematically. And the first and most important step is to separate problems from tasks.

I’m certainly not the first to apply this distinction (which has wide applicability across all kinds of work) but I think it has special significance when it comes to drafting and revising journal submissions. 

Problems vs. tasks: What’s the difference?

Problems are higher-level issues and choices that only you (or your coauthors) can fix. They require intellectual decisions about the paper’s central arguments, framing, or interpretation. 

Someone like me (your friendly editor) can certainly help with a paper’s problems, and offer opinions on how to address them. But we can’t fix them, per se; this is because they require expertise and authority that only the paper’s author possesses.

Tasks, on the other hand, are clear, bounded actions that reflect the decisions you made about problems. They can often be executed by someone else (like your editor, grad student, or even virtual assistant) once that person receives clarification and instructions from you. 

The biggest difference of all between problems and tasks is this: Tasks can be solved with scheduled effort. Problems cannot.

Why this difference matters

When you push yourself to solve problems with scheduled effort—more time at your desk, more writing blocks in your calendar, more description of a point that reviewers don’t seem to understand—you usually just exhaust yourself running in the wrong direction. Why? Because problems require time and space (and probably more of both than you’re comfortable with). The solutions to the most difficult problems often come, paradoxically, from rest and play; that’s when your subconscious mind can get to work and do the heaviest lifting for you.

Conversely, when you give tasks too much time and space in your brain and calendar—that is, when you don’t confine them to scheduled blocks of effort—you can fall deep into a rut of overthinking and perfectionism. Unimportant details snatch precious time and energy from the high-level thinking and contributions that impact your career most. 

In short, when you treat problems like tasks or tasks like problems, you end up spinning your wheels and wondering how you can be so tired with (what feels like) nothing to show for it.

Here’s what it looks like to make this mistake in real life.

In 2020, I saw an explosion in my business. Every client I had, worldwide, was locked inside writing for most of that year—and telling their colleagues about me too, it seemed. The first rule of freelancing is to make hay while the sun shines, so even as my back, wrists, and eyeballs were screaming in protest, I never said no to a job and I certainly didn’t see this as a problem at the time.

But if I had known about the problems-versus-tasks framework back then, here’s how I would have written about my situation as the year wore on and my body suffered:

Problem: 

I have far more work coming in than I can personally handle

Tasks: 

☐ Get bluelight glasses so I can look at screens longer without getting headaches

☐ Install this yellowing filter on my screen for the same reason

☐ Create templates for common/frequent emails so they take less time

☐ Download a better, more comprehensive invoicing software

☐ Create a fancy brochure outlining my services and pricing so I could share that in response to any inquiries

☐ Overhaul and enhance my website so all the new people searching me would find something that looked legitimate and professional 

☐ Get up an hour earlier every day to fit in even more editing

☐ Subscribe to recite works to help me edit references faster

☐ Break up my work schedule into six 2-hour blocks so my eyes got six non-negotiable breaks per day

I tackled all the above tasks and more for almost a year. And at the end of that year?

I was still struggling, still clocking 12-hour days at my desk, and more burnt out than ever. Perhaps you can already see why.

None of the tasks I’d undertaken addressed the actual problem.

For 11 months, I hadn’t given myself what I actually needed to solve the problem: time and space to reflect on it, then make an intentional choice about how to address it. When I finally did that (7 days fully off work, no screens allowed), I quickly realized that the “problem” was, of course, a huge opportunity: I had more work than I could do myself. The solution I decided on was to find and train other editors to help me. 

Only then could I develop a list of tasks (find other editors, train/onboard these editors, etc.) that would actually lead to the outcome I wanted: a bigger base of satisfied clients. That’s not to say that solving this problem was easy, or that the tasks within it were a breeze either. But they were all steps in the direction of an actual solution to this problem, which meant that time and effort brought me consistently closer to the outcome I desired.

So my draft is subpar/got rejected: Where do I start?

Back to your situation (assuming you’re a business professor with a paper you’d like to improve): how can problems-versus-tasks help you write and revise more effectively? Let’s do this in four easy steps.

1. Pull up or print out your draft—it doesn’t matter if it’s indeed subpar (subpar is awesome! It means you got something on the page!) or even still incomplete in certain areas. Alternatively, pull up the journal team’s feedback if you’ve received it.

2. Next, you’re going to read that draft or feedback with two colors of highlighters; these can be real or virtual highlighters but I will say there’s something deeply calming and satisfying about printing the text and using physical highlighters to do this. Pink for problems, teal for tasks is fun if you have these colors. 

Note that this sorting activity is a TASK and should be treated as one: you’re going to schedule about 90 minutes to do this. If you’re not done by the end of that time, reassess and schedule one more block for another day, but this is not deep cognitive/creative work—it’s observation.

3. As you read through your manuscript or feedback about it, quickly highlight anything that is, in your opinion, a problem in pink; highlight anything that represents a task in teal. You can make short notes/comments where you feel it’s necessary (i.e., what the problem seems to be, in brief, or what the task will probably involve), but the main thing is to get this work rapidly categorized. Don’t overthink it because you can’t really get this “wrong”: miscategorized items will be revealed as such when you start doing the work of addressing them.

Review the problems you’ve highlighted and look for patterns. Now group related problems together by marking them with the same symbol or number. You’ll often find that what looked like 10 separate issues are actually 2–3 core problems. This step is where your strongest revision strategy starts to emerge.

Examples of problems typically include spots where you (or the reviewers, if it’s a response letter) see something that’s not clear, not convincing or robust, not supported, not novel or significant enough, and so on. Reviewer language that reflects problems could read something like, “The theoretical contribution is unclear" or “I’m not sure how this mechanism is distinct from X" or “This hypothesis seems underdeveloped” etc. Because problems might require, e.g., reinterpreting data, reframing theory, revisiting the "story" of the research, and other conceptual work, solving them isn't always something that fits neatly into timed writing blocks, so go easy on yourself and give yourself space away from the draft to really think them over; in-depth discussion with colleagues, a mentor, or a professional editor is extremely effective for hashing out problems. These issues demand sufficient space to diagnose them effectively, develop a possible approach to solving them, and then turn that approach into a list of tasks. 

Examples of tasks typically include spots where something is incorrect, incomplete, inconsistent, or only partially supported. These are actions that you can execute once the decision of how to do so is clear. Reviewer feedback like "Cite those studies here" or "Define that construct earlier" or "Expand on the practical implications that you list with examples" points to tasks. Tasks require work like double-checking, formatting, and minor writing additions that can be done in scheduled blocks of writing/revision, and usually without consulting your coauthors (if you have them).

---

A sample comment and response

Say you encounter the following reviewer comment about your work: “The authors should better explain how their construct differs from prior work. Please clarify the conceptual boundaries and provide additional citations.”

It’s tempting to treat this comment as a series of tasks:

• Add a few sentences describing past work

• Add a sentence or two stating how your work is different

• Insert some citations

• Move on

But if we read between the lines (and perhaps see other comments in the same vein) we get a better sense of the underlying problem this reviewer is hinting at—namely, the construct is not sufficiently distinct or well-positioned in the literature.

If that’s the case, then a quick patch in one paragraph probably won’t solve this reviewer’s concerns. You may need to rethink your framing, sharpen your definitions, or even reposition your contribution and clarify/support it with additional (related) sentences in your introduction, theory, and discussion sections.

Check out the difference between these responses to the above sample comment:

Task-oriented response:

“We have added two citations and clarified the definition of our construct on page 5.”

Problem-oriented response:

“Thank you for sharing your concern about the distinctiveness of our construct. In response, we have sharpened the conceptual boundaries by (1) explicitly contrasting it with prior constructs, (2) refining the definition, and (3) restructuring the literature review to better highlight the gap our work addresses (pp. 4–6).”

You can see how much more convincing the second one is in terms of turning an R&R into an acceptance.

Why this step changes everything

Once you’ve separated and grouped problems versus tasks, your workflow becomes much more effective.

Instead of “Now I’ve responded to Reviewer 2, comment 3…” you shift to “Now I’ve solved this underlying problem, and updated all affected sections.” This leads to tighter and more cohesive arguments, reduces redundant work on your part, and sends a clear signal to the journal about your submission if you’re under R&R: you’ve deeply understood and applied their feedback in ways that strengthen the very foundations of your paper.

---

Final takeaway: Problems are always your first priority

Problems are deeper and more important than tasks, especially as a starting point. There’s not much point executing tasks when problems remain. Moreover, problems aren’t always explicit. Instead, they often show up as patterns across reviewer comments (a “vibe” of ongoing skepticism or pushback) or niggling doubts in your mind about limitations and ambiguities that you hope reviewers don’t notice. Particularly in the context of a response letter, don’t mistake comments flagging problems as requests for edits: these are signals that something isn’t working at a deeper level, and they require discussion and/or reconceptualizing before any writing or editing will be beneficial. 

That said, like every other part of the writing process, this work is somewhat recursive. While executing tasks, you may discover new problems that need more thinking time again, and that's okay.

Separating problems from tasks is just the first layer of a systematic revision process, but it’s a great foundation to build on. 

Once you’ve identified the core problems versus tasks, your next steps typically involve:

• Prioritizing which problems to tackle first

• Designing targeted solutions for each one

• Mapping those solutions onto specific tasks (i.e., manuscript changes)

• Then, and only then, executing tasks

In other words, strategy before execution. This approach can save you countless hours of fatigue and frustration, while also turning your revisions into illuminating exercises that help you land more and better publications.