Group Assignments and Team Projects with ADHD: Why So Hard

When I hear the phrase "group assignment," two people come to my mind. One is the person who stays silent in the message group for three days and then writes, "what was I supposed to be doing?" The other is the person who, the night before the deadline, gathers everyone's share alone.

In ADHD these two people are often the same person. Just in different weeks.

I did my assignments on the last night, but I did them. When I was alone, this arrangement somehow worked, because I was the only one paying its price. In group work, the last night becomes other people's night too. I am writing this article partly to think about that difference.

Two roles, one root

The person who disappears and the person who takes everything on look like opposites from the outside. One is called irresponsible, the other self-sacrificing. From the inside, both feed on the same place: not being able to track the work reliably, and running from the shame this would create.

The person who disappears says in the meeting, "okay, I'll take that part," and then does not remember what exactly that part was. They are ashamed to ask. The longer they do not ask, the bigger the job grows, and the bigger it grows, the harder asking becomes.

The person who takes everything on has lived this cycle and decided never to live it again. If they depend on no one, they will not leave anyone halfway. This is often called responsibility; I think it is partly self-protection too.

The hardest part of group work is not the work itself. It is keeping in mind who has the work, where it is and when it is due.

Why group work is especially hard

In an assignment done alone, all the information is in your head or on your desk. In group work, information is scattered: a decision is made verbally in the meeting, a change is discussed in the message group, the latest version of a file sits on someone else's computer.

This scattering catches working memory at its weakest point. In a small but careful experiment with children with ADHD and typically developing children, independent observers watched the children's attentive behavior under different memory loads. Two conditions explained the difference in attention: the engagement of the work of managing and directing information, and the information to be held in mind exceeding capacity. The second disrupted attention in both groups but began at lower loads in children with ADHD (Kofler et al., 2010). The sample is small and made up of children, and carrying it directly to adults would not be right. Still, it helped me understand what I live through in group work: the moment what I have to keep in mind increases, my attention scatters.

Three more things are added to this:

The deadline is distant and shared. Because the date belongs to everyone, it belongs to no one. If your own share has no interim date, the work waits in the "not now" zone.

Depending on someone else's tempo. If you cannot start until your friend finishes their part, waiting becomes a job too. The waiting state is very expensive in ADHD; you cannot move on to another task, and you cannot do what you are waiting for either.

The coordination work is invisible. Who will do what, which file is current, who needs to be reminded. Someone does this work, but no one counts it as work.

A review of ADHD in college students reports that academic difficulties are consistently seen in this group. The same review also notes that controlled intervention studies tested specifically for college students had not yet been carried out at that time (DuPaul et al., 2009). So most of the methods in this area still come from experience and general principles. I covered the general picture of the school years in the article on ADHD in school and university.

Everyone pulls back a little

Group work also has a problem that is independent of ADHD. In social psychology there is a phenomenon known as "social loafing": people tend to put in less effort in a group than when they work alone. A meta-analysis combining seventy-eight studies shows that this effect is reliable. Factors such as a person's contribution being assessed separately, expectations of coworkers, and finding the work meaningful also change this tendency markedly (Karau & Williams, 1993).

This finding told me two things. First, I should not put all the glitches in group work down to my own ADHD; some groups are messy for everyone. Second, the solution goes through the same place: when everyone's contribution is visible, overall effort recovers, and my share also comes out of my head and gets written somewhere in the open.

Shame and taking on too much

The emotional side of group work is as heavy as the practical side. In the meta-analysis examining emotion regulation difficulty in adult ADHD, the strongest difference came out in emotional lability (Beheshti et al., 2020). Its counterpart in daily life is this: a friend asking "did you finish that part?" can be experienced as something much bigger than the question itself.

We often call this feeling rejection sensitivity. I know it is not an official diagnosis and that the research behind it is limited; still, it helps describe that moment.

Taking everything on is a shield against this feeling. No one can ask, because everything is already with me. The shield has a price: you are exhausted on the last night, your friends have not learned what they needed to learn, and the resentment of "I always do it all" quietly builds.

Taking on too much is the most tiring way to protect yourself from the shame of falling behind.

A small system to set up at the first meeting

The fate of group work is usually decided at the first meeting. The arrangement I find worth trying has four parts, and all of them are written:

One shared table. Three columns are enough: task, person, date. Every task talked about in the meeting goes into this table before the meeting ends. A task that is not in the table is treated as nonexistent.

An interim date for each share. Counting backward from the shared deadline, a date for each person's own part. Preferably a few days before the deadline. Its name in the glossary is staged delivery, and in group work it is the simplest tool for breaking the last-night chain.

Asking for a small and concrete share. "The literature part" is a vague job. "Find five sources and take three-sentence notes from each" is a job you can start. When taking your share, making its first move clear helps too.

A coordination role for one person. Giving this role openly to someone makes the invisible work visible. It does not have to be you; for someone whose working memory is strained it may not be the first choice.

A few sentences you can use in the meeting:

• "Let's write this in the table, or we'll forget."
• "What exactly is my part, can we write it in one sentence?"
• "I'm putting Thursday for my own share, I'll show you that day."

The last sentence has a function of its own: a promise made to someone else produces a much more real urgency than a promise made to yourself. The details of this are in the article on panic productivity.

Choosing your role to suit yourself

In group work not everyone has to do every job equally, and I think this is the least talked about opportunity for someone with ADHD.

Different stages of a project ask for different skills. At the beginning there is generating ideas, framing the subject, making connections among scattered sources. In the middle there is a long and patient period of collecting and organizing. At the end there is formatting, the bibliography, the final read and delivery.

I am good in the first stage. The curiosity is fresh, the subject is new, attention comes by itself. In the last stage, though, the smallest details can slip past me and finishing looks like a mountain. When I know this, I can be more honest when taking my share: "Let me take the introduction and framework part; the final read is better done by someone who pays attention to detail."

This is not counted as an escape, because in return I take on a job that I can really do well. It is also a good trade for the rest of the group: when everyone works where they are strong, the total quality of the work goes up.

Still, you will not always be able to take the part you like. In that case, splitting the boring share into small pieces and setting an hour to work together helps. Working silently together at the same table or in a video call can start a job that cannot be started alone.

There is also the matter of the message group. The communication of a group assignment often turns into a stream of messages flowing all day. Every notification splits attention, and when you turn the notifications off, an important decision slips by. The middle path I find worth trying is muting the group's notifications, looking at the stream at two fixed hours a day, and asking that important decisions also be written in the shared table. That way, missing messages does not mean missing decisions.

When you fall behind

It will happen. Sometimes neither the table nor the interim date will hold. What matters is what you do at that moment.

At the moment I notice I have fallen behind, the worst option is staying silent. Silence turns into a debt of explanation within two days, and into avoidance within a week. A short and early message is often enough:

"My part is later than I planned. I will finish it by Wednesday evening. If this holds anything up on your side, tell me and I will finish that piece first."

There is no long apology in this message, no beating yourself up. There is a situation, a date and a question about the other side's work. These three are also what your group mates really need.

There is one more thing I often remind myself: struggling in group work does not mean I cannot cooperate. It usually only shows that the memory of the work does not rest on anyone. When I put the memory out in the open, into a table, I too can be a comfortable part of the group.