there is a lot that goes unsaid and untaught in the world of academic writing. i feel that most advisors/supervisors/director of graduate studies/even some first year seminar leaders take the stance of "you should already know how to do this" or "i'm sure you've learned this before". as someone who works with writers all around the world at all kinds of universities in all sorts of disciplines: NOPE. it is much more rare that i meet someone who was given a comprehensive toolkit for academic writing than someone who was given nothing. so, if you are trying to figure it all out, you are definitely not alone!
academic writing is a collection of skills that in theory, have an order of operations:
read
draft
revise
submit
but there is also a LOT of flexibility within that - some people bounce between the first three stages frequently, some pass through them with relatively equal time spent in each, and some move through it differently depending on the project, or their own brain at the time.
one thing that i do find consistently though is that i work with writers who are, consciously or not, spending a lot of time drafting (ie, generating new words) and working with facets of their writing that would actually be more easily addressed in a revision stage. what do i mean? great question!
for example, you could be writing along and you start to really notice your transitions (or lack thereof). maybe an advisor gave you feedback on another draft about transitions, or you saw a twitter thread about them, or someone mentioned them in passing - but you're thinking about them in an early-ish draft stage. so you spend a lot of time learning about transitions (here's one of my favorite resources on them!) and you spend a whole day crafting the transitions for a section of your new chapter.
now, there's nothing wrong with that! sometimes it feels good to practice a skill or go deep on a new facet of your writing but also, you might have just spent a bunch of time creating the world's most beautiful transitions only to complete restructure that chapter in a few weeks, and have to redo them. it's not that you should NEVER work with your transitions, but rather that there are more and less efficient times to do so.
so here is a very rough, moderately personal list of what skills i tend to focus on in early draft phases, and what i tend to do in later revisions! feel free to take what works and leave the rest, but the aim here is to be explicit so you can check your own workflow and see if there's anything you want to experiment with!
things i do during drafting (mostly)
freewriting
rough restructuring (taking big chunks and rearranging them)
trying to figure out WHAT i'm trying to say
figuring out the scope of what does and does not belong in what piece i'm working on
things i do during revision (mostly)
checking on accuracy of quotations / facts / etc
argument (how strongly am i arguing something, what kinds of arguments, etc)
transitions
sentence structure
writing the introduction and conclusion
writing abstracts
checking for flow
most of us are not used to revising work even once, much less multiple times so that balance can feel really off if you're not used to it! but revision is where a bulk of the work to take a piece from "some thoughts about something" into "a cohesive argument" happens! and more people should talk about that.