Starting a new role often brings fresh perspective on how organisations function. Sometimes that perspective is uncomfortable. Over recent months, I’ve realised that much of the administrative burden in my work exists primarily as a workaround for systemic dysfunction. I’m not creating value—I’m compensating for broken systems. And this is a sector-wide problem in higher education.

This realisation arrived gradually, then all at once. The moment of clarity came during what should have been a straightforward task: forwarding an email about curriculum changes to programme leads. As I clicked “send,” I thought: if my only function here is to pass this message along, then either my role is unnecessary or the system is broken. Possibly both.

The unsettling truth is that much academic work falls into this category—tasks that exist not because they advance our scholarly mission, but because they patch over systemic failures that institutions seem unable or unwilling to address.

Understanding the administrative burden

Once you start looking for it, this pattern appears everywhere in academic life. Consider a few common scenarios:

Information cascades

Senior leadership makes a decision that needs to reach teaching staff. Rather than direct communication, the information cascades through multiple layers: from deans to heads of school, from heads of school to programme directors, from programme directors to module leaders. Each person in the chain forwards the message, often reformatting it in their own way. The same information arrives through different channels—email, Teams, SharePoint—with different subject lines, making it difficult for recipients to recognise they’re reading the same update three times. Your role in this system? You’re a human relay station. If the organisation had functioning communication infrastructure, your involvement wouldn’t be necessary.

Quality assurance documentation

You spend hours completing forms about your teaching activities—contact hours, assessment methods, learning outcomes—that duplicate information already documented elsewhere. Your module handbook contains these details. Your institutional systems contain these details. Yet someone, somewhere, needs them in a different format, in a different system. Your time is spent being a data bridge between incompatible platforms. If the systems talked to each other, this work wouldn’t exist.

Committee coordination

You attend regular meetings whose primary function is ensuring two departments communicate with each other. Without this committee, essential information wouldn’t flow between teams who should naturally collaborate. Your presence—and your time—exists as a human workaround for structural siloing. If the organisation was designed for cross-functional work, the committee would be unnecessary.

Student query routing

Students email you questions about administrative processes—exam arrangements, deadline extensions, support services—that you have no authority over. You forward their queries to the relevant office, wait for responses, and relay information back. You’re functioning as a human API, connecting students to services that should be directly accessible. If students could contact the right people directly, your role as intermediary wouldn’t be needed.

These examples share a common feature: the work exists because the system is broken, not because the work you do is valuable.

When efficiency becomes complicity

And here’s the uncomfortable conclusion I’ve reached: the better I am at these tasks, the more I’m enabling the dysfunction to continue.

When I efficiently process cascaded communications, decode redundant messages, and ensure information reaches its destination despite systemic failures, I’m not solving problems—I’m masking them. My attempts to become more competent at the task makes the broken system appear functional. My enhanced productivity hides the fact that the work shouldn’t exist at all.

This is a trap. Investing in personal productivity strategies—better email management, improved task systems, more efficient workflows—entrenches systemic problems. You become very good at doing work that doesn’t need to be done, which reduces the organisational pressure to fix the underlying systems.

This is where individual productivity advice can fail us. We’re told to manage our time better, streamline our workflows, develop better habits. These strategies matter, and they genuinely help. But they can’t solve systemic problems. You can become exceptionally efficient at processing redundant communications, but that efficiency doesn’t eliminate the redundancy—it just makes it more bearable.

When your role exists primarily as a workaround, personal productivity strategies reach a natural limit.

Uncomfortable questions

Recognising these patterns raises difficult questions:

1. What proportion of your workload consists of compensating for systemic dysfunction? Not the work itself—the teaching, research, and scholarship you’re meant to do—but the work that exists because systems don’t function properly.
2. How much time do you spend being a human bridge between incompatible processes? The hours spent duplicating information, routing queries, attending coordination meetings, translating between departments that should communicate directly.
3. What work would disappear if the organisation fixed its systems? Imagine your institution invested in proper communication infrastructure, integrated databases, clear workflows. How much of your current workload would simply disappear?
4. What would you do with that reclaimed time? The research you’re not conducting because you’re forwarding emails. The thoughtful course redesign that never happens because you’re completing duplicate paperwork. The strategic thinking that gets pushed aside because you’re routing student queries.

These aren’t abstract questions. They represent real opportunity costs—scholarly work that doesn’t happen because you’re too busy patching systemic failures.

The limits of personal agency

So what do you do when you realise that you’re part of a broken system?

The temptation is to focus on what you can control. Adopt better workflows. Develop clearer communication protocols with your immediate team. Be more intentional about which tasks you take on. Create boundaries around your time. These individual strategies matter. They provide relief, reduce friction, and often model better practices for others.

But individual solutions can’t fix systemic problems. Even if you become exceptionally good in your role as a workaround, you can’t eliminate the need for the workaround without organisational change. You can reduce the time you spend patching failures, but you can’t address the failures themselves.

The question isn’t whether to develop good personal workflows. You should. The question is recognising when personal optimisation becomes a substitute for systemic change—and when advocating for better systems becomes more important than working around bad ones.

For academics without positional authority—those who can’t redesign institutional processes or commission new platforms—this is particularly fraught. You might clearly see the dysfunction and understand what needs to change, but you lack the power to implement those changes. Your options narrow to working around the problems or burning political capital advocating for solutions you might not get to see.

Recognition as the first step

Perhaps the most valuable thing you can do is simply recognise these patterns for what they are.

When you realise that significant portions of your workload exist primarily to compensate for systemic failures, that recognition changes how you think about your work. You stop seeing these tasks as inevitable parts of academic life and start seeing them as symptoms of broken systems.

That shift in perspective matters because it prevents a particular kind of internalisation. When academics struggle with overwhelming workloads, we often assume the problem is personal—we’re not efficient enough, organised enough, productive enough. Recognising that you’re not the problem is a great first step.

This isn’t an argument for refusing to do necessary work or becoming obstructive. It’s an argument for clear-eyed acknowledgement of what your role actually involves. When you forward an email that could have been sent directly, you can acknowledge: this task exists because the system is broken. When you duplicate information across incompatible platforms, you can name it: I’m compensating for poor technology decisions. When you attend a coordination meeting that exists only to bridge structural silos, you can recognise: this meeting is a workaround, not meaningful work.

That recognition doesn’t immediately solve anything. You still need to forward the email, complete the forms, attend the meeting. But it changes what you’re willing to accept as normal. It makes you less likely to blame yourself for struggling with unsustainable workloads. And it makes you more likely to advocate for change when opportunities arise—even if those opportunities are limited.

What comes next

For most academics reading this, particularly those without senior leadership positions, the practical options are constrained. You can’t single-handedly redesign institutional communication systems. You can’t commission integrated databases. You can’t eliminate committees or restructure departments.

But you can stop thinking of these dysfunctions as inevitable. You can question whether specific tasks add value or simply patch over failures. You can have conversations with colleagues about what work shouldn’t exist. And when you do have opportunities to influence systems—through committee work, strategic planning, or informal advocacy—you can prioritise changes that eliminate unnecessary work rather than making that work more efficient.

The goal isn’t to refuse all coordination work or reject every administrative task. Universities are complex organisations, and some coordination is genuinely necessary. The goal is developing better judgement about when you’re doing valuable work and when you’re simply compensating for systemic dysfunction.

Because if the primary function of your role is to work around broken systems, the question isn’t how to do that more efficiently. The question is how long you’re willing to accept that as normal.