[jpeloquin]

> Well, obviously the part-time thing will bring a reduction in my institutional teaching and admin duties. I have to say there is uncertainty about how much relief will arise in practice

As someone who has tried something similar, institutional bureaucracy expands to fill all available time. People engaging in bureaucratic empire-building will still happily consume your personal unpaid time. And splitting attention between multiple lines of work creates some legitimate additional overhead, which doesn't help.

I'm not sure what the winning strategy is. I think it is necessary to either get out entirely or play the bureaucrats' "system-game" to some degree, but not on their terms and not fairly. When the bureaucracy demands useless work, maximize their costs and minimize yours. Many academics constitutively cannot make themselves do a lazy, poor job, but is a useful skill to deploy defensively so that you can fulfill your education and research responsibilities. Often you'll find that the bureaucracy only cares about the superficial appearance of compliance; the actual actions performed are irrelevant to them. Shift responsibility to some other part of the bureaucracy and use LLMs to generate boilerplate. If the bureaucracy never attempts to punish you in any way, that may indicate you're being more compliant than necessary. This approach is safest if your retirement plan is fully funded and you don't truly need to keep the job. It is also helpful if at some part of what you do is visibly important to someone who does have power; this helps deflect consequences when you accidentally step a over a line. Everything depends on context and execution though; I hope the part-time approach works out for you.

[like_any_other]

> As someone who has tried something similar, institutional bureaucracy expands to fill all available time.

Can you give examples? I'm very curious what their useless work looks like.

[squigz]

How do you determine what amount of bureaucracy is acceptable to do?

[jpeloquin]

Prioritize work by ROI and alignment with the institution's mission, communicate the prioritization to relevant decision-makers in your management chain, and actually follow through on it unless coerced otherwise.

Edit: There's no guarantee this will work out positively—nothing is guaranteed—but it's worth considering if the alternative is giving up / changing careers.

[chii]

just enough to get yelled at, but not enough to get fired. Be an annoyance to deal with, by towing the line.