Working with dyslexia: How we plan with patterns

At Naked Paper, we always strive for a creative, positive outlook. It’s how we make the best bleach-free toilet paper around, and it's also how we make the best of our team.

We all have diverse talents and ways of thinking. Giving people room to work their own way makes the most of the different strengths we bring to the table.

Today we’re chatting with our Logistics Manager Dave about how his dyslexia comes into play as he monitors our stock and plans our transport.

(We've also used some sketches he made on our team trip to our factory to illustrate this post)

Hello Dave! Tell us a bit about yourself and what you do at Naked Paper 

Hello! I’m an artist and logistics professional based in East Sussex. 

I’ve been working with Naked Paper for three years in our logistics and demand planning. This means I spend a lot of time organising things with our factory and our transport providers so we don't have too much stock or not enough stock, and hopefully nobody runs out of loo roll.    

When were you first aware of your dyslexia? 

Reading was a challenge and I didn’t find it enjoyable. It’s a cliché but words really did shift around on the page. I came up with a lot of strategies to work around my dyslexia at school so it wasn’t spotted early on, but I always had to try really hard at things that other people seemed to find simple and I found a lot of school work exhausting.

Then I went to art college - where they basically test everyone at the door - and it got flagged right away. 

Have you found dyslexia to be a challenge at work? 

In some corporate environments dyslexia can feel like a race you’re losing all the time. I’ve worked with people who can fire off dozens of emails per hour or digest a massive report in one sitting but that’s just not me.

It takes a lot of mental bandwidth for me to read lots of words on a page, or keep an email thread going by text, so it’s not great if I’m under a lot of time pressure and also have to be doing my own job at the same time. It can be really overwhelming. 

Have things been different at Naked Paper? 

At Naked Paper, the culture is different. We are trying to make our products as sustainable as possible but I’ve found the way of working is much more sustainable for me on a day-to-day level as well. 

There are time pressures in logistics, but we’re all given a lot of free reign to tackle things in our own way. This means I get the space and time I need to process information, and I can also double-check my work (and my spelling). 

We also work from home so I can set up my desk in a quiet spot away from distractions and I’m not bothering anyone when I play droning music to focus. 

Do you think your dyslexia makes a difference in the work you do with us?

Definitely. Logistics is often seen as a linear process where things go from A to B. 

To me, it’s more like a giant 3D puzzle, a bit like the books I struggled with at school. But here my visual way of processing information is an asset. 

I’m able to see the levels of stock and how our boxes of loo roll, tissues, and kitchen roll are moving from our factory in Spain to our delivery hub in the Midlands and out to customers. It's like a big shifting map.

This is helpful because in real life things don’t always just go from A to B; there’s things like closed roads and driver shortages and bad weather to consider. We’re also trying to bring down our logistics emissions all the time. So we might favour some routes or types of transport over others. 

If a shipping route is blocked or there’s a temporary bottleneck in production, I can see the whole picture and look for a solution that will cause the least disruption to the pattern as a whole. 

Any examples of savings you’ve spotted by seeing patterns? 

One thing I’ve been able to set up is implementing a “moving average” to forecast how much of each product we’re going to need. 

This means that we look at overall picture of what we’ve sold in the past, and we use this to predict what we’re going to need next week, next month, or even in a few months time. It’s more complicated than it might sound because that average is constantly changing, or “moving,” as the name suggests.

But having this moving average is helpful because it means we can forecast much further in the future. This allows us to plan in advance to move stock in the most efficient way, by using electrified rail for example, rather than road. 

What do you do when the day’s work is done? 

Keeping up an artistic practice is really important to me. Working from home means that there’s no commute, so I can spend some time each day drawing and painting. It’s a great rest for my brain, and gives me a reason to go out and take photographs so I have material to work with.

Finally, any pearls of wisdom for working with dyslexia? 

Working with it is the right way of thinking. You really don’t need a neurotypical brain to be a good planner. If you’re able to carve out the time and space to get a clear view of the pattern you want to build, you’re set up for creative problem solving that plays to your strengths. 

It helps if you have supportive colleagues and some doom metal on the playlist.

Cheers Dave! 

If you want to learn more about how we work at Naked Paper, you can read up on our team trip to our factory. 

And if you want to try toilet paper, kitchen roll, and tissue that’s powered by patterns, you can find it in our shop.