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Psychohistorian comments on The First Step is to Admit That You Have a Problem - Less Wrong
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This is an interesting idea, though I'm not sure if it's terribly useful.. Here's a summary that may make more sense for some readers. The examples are entertaining, but they may obfuscate the central point a little.
-A "task" is where you have some goal, D, and some series of operations, A, B, and C that will result in the attainment of this goal. All you have to do is actually carry out those operations and you should attain your goal.
-A "problem" is where you have goal D, but you do not know any series of operations that you could potentially perform to attain that goal. You need some additional information so that you can understand what procedures will yield D as a result. Once you have this information, you no longer have a problem; you have a task, and you merely need to perform the series of operations and you'll have D.
I think this gets the central point across effectively.
Sometimes a problem doesn't have a goal so much as an... ungoal. Basically, an attitude towards a state of affairs that is "I want ~that". That seems awfully broad to classify as a goal. Tasks do properly have goals in mind; not all problems do.
Right; in addition to not narrowing down the search space, our hardware doesn't process "run away from bad thing" in the same way as it does "search for good thing"; in particular, the former induces stress responses that were designed for short-term activities like escaping predators or territorial fights. To get optimal long-term motivation, you need to be seeking something good, rather than trying to escape something bad.
What's more, simply reversing "~that" (e.g. turning "not be broke" into "have money") doesn't always work either. In Robert Fritz's book, The Path Of Least Resistance, he points out that the reason most people fail at achieving goals is that their goals are simply rephrased versions of their problems. The key issue, he says, is attitude; merely changing the words around doesn't automatically switch you from a problem-escaping mindset to a goal-seeking one.
That is not the original point your post is making, of course; I just wanted to add that even if you narrow down the search space to a specific target, there may also be an attitude issue required to prevent akrasia due to ego depletion -- the most common result of operating in the problem-escaping mindset while trying to achieve a long-term goal.
I would say all purposeful action is goal-directed. You may need to clarify your goal before you can effectively work toward it, but the goal is there even if you can't state it clearly yet.
That raises the question of the common case where you do have a set of operations [A,B,C] that will result in attainment of the goal but where there is a potentially better solution out there potentially worth trying to find.
Thus the person in question has a choice. She can treat this as a task, or she can treat this as a problem. Thus wouldn't we define a "task" as where you have some goal D and selected a potential set of actions that will (may?) result in attainment of this goal. However a problem remains a problem even if such a task exists until such time as that task is selected to be used; merely having a task available does not mean you no longer have a problem.
Additional information or additional resources, if I read the article correctly.
Yes, that got left out - see my other top-level comment. I think a lack of resources is best thought of as a lack of the knowledge of how to attain such resources, which I explain in detail in another comment.