Living with Dyslexia: Practical Strategies for Everyday Life

Adult life involves a surprising amount of invisible literacy. Emails, forms, messages, instructions, appointments, deadlines: most of it arrives in writing, most of it assumes a reliable memory, and very little of it is announced as difficult. If parts of that cost you more effort than they seem to cost other people, the effort is real, and it is worth working around rather than through.

Technology as a friend

The most capable tools are usually the ones already on your phone and computer. Read-aloud, dictation, spellcheck, calendars, reminders and document scanning are built into almost everything now, and built-in tools have the advantage of being available everywhere you already work.

• •Text-to-speech for long documents, web pages and your own drafts.
• •Dictation when saying it is faster than typing it.
• •Spellcheck and grammar tools, used on a final pass rather than while you think.
• •Calendar alerts and reminders for anything with a date or a time attached.
• •Scanning paper documents so they become searchable, readable and listenable.

Our guide to technology and assistive tools for dyslexia goes into detail, and the free CALL Scotland app wheels group tools by the task you are trying to do, which is the most sensible way to choose.

Emails and written communication

A few habits make written communication noticeably less costly. Draft first and edit separately, because composing and checking at once is what makes it slow. Listen to anything important read aloud before sending, since your ears catch what your eyes skip. Keep short templates for messages you send often. And where a message matters, give it time: written and sent in one sitting is rarely better than written now and sent after lunch.

Forms and paperwork

• •Ask for a digital copy where you can, so you can type rather than handwrite and reuse what you have already written.
• •Keep standard details, such as your address history or references, in one secure place you can copy from.
• •Use text-to-speech on the guidance notes, which are often longer than the form itself.
• •Break a long form into sections and do it in more than one sitting.
• •Ask for an accessible format where you need one. That is a reasonable request, not a fuss.

Appointments and remembering information

The aim is to stop trusting memory with things memory is bad at. Put the appointment in the calendar the moment it is made, with an alert a day before as well as an hour before. Take notes or a voice memo where that is permitted. And after anything important, ask for the key points in writing. Most services will happily send a confirmation email, and having it written down removes the need to reconstruct it later.

Work and study

The strategies that help tend to be boringly effective: written task lists rather than mental ones, asking for instructions in writing, recording meetings or lectures where permitted, templates for repeated pieces of work, and a planning tool you will actually open. If you are studying, our guide to managing university study when organisation does not come naturally covers the planning side in detail, and students may be able to access software and training through Disabled Students' Allowance.

If work is where the difficulty bites, a workplace needs assessment looks at the specific tasks in your role and recommends practical adjustments, and our guides to reasonable adjustments at work and whether to tell your employer cover the conversations that follow.

Reading longer documents

• •Have it read aloud, at a speed you can follow, while you listen or follow along.
• •Read in chunks with a purpose: decide what you need from a section before you read it.
• •Highlight or mark as you go, so the second pass only covers what mattered.
• •Change the display: bigger text, more spacing, a calmer background, a reading view.
• •Start from a summary where one exists, then read the detail you actually need.

Organisation and household life

The household versions of the same tricks work just as well as the office ones. A shared calendar the whole household can see, recurring reminders for the jobs that repeat, labelled homes for the things that otherwise wander, and a rule that important information lives in one place rather than in your head. Every item you move out of your memory and into a system is effort you get back.

Time management and deadlines

One reminder is easy to dismiss. Two or three, set at increasing urgency, are much harder to lose. Make deadlines visible rather than implied, and break anything large into smaller actions with their own dates, so 'sort the insurance renewal' becomes 'find the documents on Tuesday, get a quote on Thursday.' Our university article has more on planning backwards from deadlines, and the technique is not limited to students.

Names, directions and information

Forgetting a name you heard thirty seconds ago, or a route you have driven before, is not a personal failing. It is ordinary memory doing ordinary memory things, sometimes under extra load. External aids remove the pressure entirely: save the address rather than memorising it, ask how to spell the name rather than guessing, write the door code down. Nobody respectable is keeping score.

Cognitive load and tiredness

For some dyslexic adults, tasks heavy in reading, writing or remembering simply take more effort, and the cost arrives later as tiredness rather than during as failure. If that is you, pacing is a strategy, not a weakness: alternate heavy and light tasks, protect a quiet gap after a demanding one, and stop treating rest as something you must earn by finishing first.

Self-advocacy

The single most useful skill is being able to say, calmly and specifically, what helps. 'I work best with written instructions' or 'could I have that by email?' gives a manager, lecturer or colleague something they can actually do. You do not owe anyone an explanation of your diagnosis to make a reasonable request, but if you have one, it can make formal support easier to arrange.

Build your own toolkit

There is no prize for doing something the hardest way. A tool that saves you effort is a support, not a shortcut, and using it well is a skill in itself. Over time the strategies that genuinely help become your own toolkit, and it will look different from anyone else's, which is exactly right.

If some of this has sounded familiar and you have wondered why, our free adult dyslexia indicator check takes a few minutes, and you are welcome to get in touch for a free 15-minute telephone call about whether a full assessment would tell you anything useful. There is no obligation either way.