There are four fundamental lab techniques to know for organic chemistry. You need to see the basic goal in each, and then consider the impact of slight modifications.
Distillation: The basic premise here is that you have a mixture of liquids and you want to remove one or more of the components. In order to separate one of the component liquids from the mixture, you need to put it into another phase. You could try selectively freezing one component out and then filtering, but that is not a technique of utility. Instead, the common strategy is to convert one of the component liquids into a gas, let the gas naturally flow up and away from the mixture, and then cool and condense it back into a liquid at a location away from the original mixture. The basic idea is that simple. The complications come into play as boiling points get close together, in which case you need to employ fractional distillation as opposed to simple distillation. There are other modifications, but they all involve the same basic goal.
Chromatography: The basic premise here is that you have a mixture of solids and you want to remove one or more of the components. In order to separate the component solids from the mixture, you need to them interact with a solvent and a solid polymer where they are in essence solutes that can occasionally stick to the polymer. How much they 'dissolve' versus how much they 'stick' allows you to line them up for a race to the finish line. As each component crosses the finish line, you collect that component isolated from the other components. Again, there are different versions such as thin layer (up a silica plate or a piece of paper) and column (for bulk purification.)
