Research Note 001: CMT Needed a Home

Cognitive Mode Theory did not start as an attempt to build a theory because it started with me trying to keep too many parts of my life moving at once.

I was balancing my work at the Apple Developer Academy, building Technically Speaking, managing client projects, continuing my own professional development, raising my children, and trying to protect some version of my sanity while doing all of it as a neurodivergent person.

I had calendars.

I had task managers.

I had project-management experience.

Yet I was still running into moments where I could look directly at something I needed to do, understand why it mattered, have enough time to do it and somehow still feel completely unable to move it forward.

That bothered me. A LOT.

The problem did not always seem to be motivation, discipline, priority, or even executive function in the broad way we usually talk about it. Sometimes I could work intensely for hours...just not on the thing sitting at the top of the list and sometimes switching from researching something to creating something felt disproportionately difficult.

Sometimes a project looked actionable until I tried to start it and realized there was an unresolved decision buried underneath it. Five tasks would appeared to be waiting for me when, in reality, four of them were waiting on the same missing piece of information.

I started wondering...

What if the task wasn’t actually the task?

Build the presentation, write the article, plan the workshop.

Those labels describe outcomes or activities, but they do not necessarily tell us what kind of thinking has to happen next.

That question became the beginning of Cognitive Mode Theory.

For the last several weeks, I’ve been sharing that developing research publicly through short-form videos and what began as me thinking out loud quickly became something other people recognized in their own work.

People started asking for longer explanations.

They wanted to understand the methodology.

They wanted to participate.

Some wanted to know whether the framework could help them structure their own work and at the same time, the research itself was getting more complicated.

CMT started as my attempt to understand how to operate my own life more sustainably and it was becoming a research program.

I’m learning to think less like the person doing all the work and more like the person orchestrating it.

I recently started my second-year project with the Apple Developer Academy...

And from there, the project management → delegation → handoffs → readiness → orchestration section becomes even stronger because now the reader understands why you were primed to notice those patterns.

There’s also a line I think belongs somewhere later in the piece:

CMT grew out of a deeply practical problem: People need a way to manage the cognitive reality of their work, not just the 'list of things' they're was responsible for.

That feels like one of the clearest origin statements I've had. CMT didn’t start because I wanted to invent a theory. It started because I was trying to manage everything while every productivity system kept telling me what I had to do without helping me understand what my brain actually had to do next.

& now.. here we are.