A companion to the main ADHD article, written for professors and higher-education professionals.
You said no to the extra committee, blocked off Friday afternoons for nothing, and you are still hitting a wall by Wednesday every single week. Down the hall, a student who dropped two electives is still melting down before every single exam.
What this actually is
Overwhelm is not a math problem of too many items on a list. It is a decision load problem, too many micro choices about sequencing, starting, and switching between tasks, layered onto too little external structure to hold any of it. Removing tasks without removing decisions does almost nothing to the actual load.
How it shows up
In you, it looks like a "lighter" semester that still ends in exhaustion, because every remaining task still requires you to decide when, how, and in what order, with no system holding that decision for you. Academic culture treats burnout as a workload issue and prescribes "cut back," which frequently fails ND faculty for exactly this reason, the cutting never touches the decision fatigue underneath. In your students, it looks like the one who dropped a class and still cannot function during finals, or who reads as fragile under a "normal" load that is actually two systems, academic and sensory, both maxed out simultaneously in a crowded lecture hall with bad lighting and no quiet exit.
What actually helps
For yourself, externalize decisions with a single trusted system, a shared calendar with default recurring time blocks, batching all grading into set windows instead of letting it scatter across every free hour of the week. For your students, build structure into the course itself: a clear weekly rhythm, explicit sequencing on assignments instead of vague open-ended instructions, quiet or reduced sensory testing options offered as a standard part of the course, not a special favor someone has to request in tears. In advising conversations, ask what is actually eating a student's bandwidth, decisions, sensory load, or raw task volume, before recommending they simply drop another course. Cutting the wrong thing leaves the real problem completely untouched. Notice that a student who says everything is fine one week and vanishes the next is often not lying to you, their bandwidth genuinely changed that fast, and the check-in question needs to be asked before the crash, not after. A five minute check-in scheduled proactively, not reactively, catches the slide before it becomes a silence.
One move this term
Build one default decision out of your own week, a fixed grading block, a fixed office hour structure, anything that removes a recurring choice from your day permanently.
Less on the list rarely means less overwhelm, for you or for them. Fewer decisions does.
Go deeper
Read the full piece: ADHD Overwhelm: Why \"Just Do Less\" Doesn't Work (and What Does)
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Written by ND Hive.