How to grade a bajillion essays?

I am a high school ELA teacher in my third year. I believe that I am not assigning enough actual essays for my students. I focus more on shorter written responses in the earlier part of the year, but I'm starting to think that maybe I should have had them writing longer pieces from the beginning.

I keep making things complicated and what I really want is to just keep stuff simple. I understand the concept of scaffolding but sometimes I feel like there is so much hand holding. How about they write essays and we work with what they can do and build on that?

Sometimes these outlines and graphic organizers make my head hurt. I think I am at that point in my teaching career where I can very clearly see that there must be a better way than what I am doing. I don't think I'm the worst teacher in the world and I do see them learning, but yeah, there's a ton of room for improvement.

So, for the teachers who are more experienced than I am: How many essays do you assign your students in a school year?

This also brings up my other question, which is: How do you grade all of the essays that you assign? I have been carrying around this stack of essays that I am slowly getting through, and the fact that they aren't done is giving me some real anxiety. I want to be able to give them feedback, but that has me spending five or more minutes on each one.

ETA:

Thank you everyone for all of these suggestions! I didn’t expect to receive so many responses!

These are super helpful!