How writing freed up a founder’s headspace

When you write down everything that you need to do onto a chart or in a diary, you can clear it from your head.

Chris Quickfall is dyslexic. So he thought of using his experience of the condition to start a business that could also help people. In 2017, he established Cognassist, which offers tests that can detect dyslexia and ADHD, among other things.

But the venture was taking a huge toll on Quickfall himself, in large part due to his ailment.

"Dyslexic people like me are very good at solving problems, but we tend to struggle with organising ourselves and our work," Quickfall told the BBC.

He found himself overwhelmed, and lost almost all his hair due to alopecia.

"Back then, I was an abysmal manager," Quickfall said. "As we started hiring people and scaling up, I found it difficult to manage the whole sense of change. Lots of what I used to describe as 'missiles' would come into me.

"I was having to figure out how to respond to change, what my competitors were doing, what my customers needed and what my staff needed. And the way I responded was just by putting in more time, working really long hours - 100-hour weeks for well over a year. I worked a lot harder, but I never really worked a lot smarter."

Quickfall realised he had too much on his mind, and some of that baggage had to be offloaded. He started putting it down in a diary or on a chart. Or what he calls the dashboard.

"One of my rules now is I'm not allowed to hold anything in my head," Quickfall said. "It has to be put on the dashboard, or it's got to be in an inbox or the diary. I separate out. What are my quarterly goals, what are my monthly goals and my weekly goals? Who have I got to speak to, and what actions am I responsible for delivering?"

According to Quickfall, all entrepreneurs can benefit from dashboarding

"When you write down everything that you need to do onto a chart or in a diary, you can clear it from your head,” he said. “I feel that clears up my mental capacity. I'm not as stressed as I used to be, so I can sleep really well and I'm better tomorrow."

According to Quickfall, all entrepreneurs can benefit from dashboarding.

"The challenge of building a company is that you're going to have a ferocious amount of change and that's going to be very, very fast and pretty relentless," he said. "Having a system to manage that is paramount, whether you're dyslexic or not dyslexic."