How to deal with administrative duties killing the research spirit?

First, I absolutely do appreciate your disaffection with the situation.

I would wager that some of your disappointment is due to pointlessness of some of the administrative activities, or the pointlessness of trying to "over-perfect" things that only need to be "good enough".

Also, some administrative problems will never be solved/resolved, but only "stayed", and require a certain (perhaps small) effort forever. Expending more effort at this moment will not solve those problems. Staying up late will not solve the problems. They're like laundry or dishes that just have to be dealt with, regularly, and "doing a great job on laundry" this week will not really reduce the laundry burden for the next week.

But, yes, these administrative things are very important to keep things going. So there is some exercise of thought to see how much of one's motive force to allocate to "routine" tasks, etc.

You may know the saying "if a job is worth doing, it's worth doing well". The opposite is also true: "if a job is not worth doing, it is NOT worth doing well." Most administration falls into that category.

Take a step back and figure out how important your admin tasks really are. Admin work isn't like writing a paper, where poor work will be rejected, or be visible for the rest of your career.

To deal with your two examples: obviously organizing thesis defences is important, but whatever timetable you produce, most of the candidates will think they are being stressed by the time table. So don't waste a lot of time trying to do a "perfect" job - just get some dates in everyone's diaries, and move on.

For the slides showing student satisfaction: well, who will actually check whatever numbers you put on the slides? Everybody wants to hear the message that satisfaction is improving, or at least that it is not getting worse. Put together some numbers that tell them what they want to hear, and that's the job done. If it's only based on 80% of the data that might theoretically be available if you searched for it and chased up people who didn't supply it, don't waste your time chasing the other 20% - just use what you have.

To summarize: think about how your "admin" output is going to be used, and much of the work will probably disappear. The irony of management and administrative jobs is that they are often done by people who never find out how quick and easy management and administration really are, once you filter out all the tasks that are just creating random noise in the organisation.

The situation is often discouraging but rarely hopeless. I had to do committee work along those lines, where any serious strategic thinking had been taken away from the committee.

There are several silver linings.

First you have discovered that you are not the administrative type, and from what you say you are unlikely to get fooled again. Next, you have an appreciation for how the system works, v.g. how important these surveys are to the administration etc.; you now also have an appreciation of who are the real “doers” and who are the simple paper pushers, not only in the administrative side but probably also in the academic side since you likely interacted with other faculty at some point. In other words, you now know potential allies and who to avoid to get things done.

I gave up on one particular committee because of lack of stimulation at the work and lack of open-mindedness by the administrators in charge: I cannot imagine making a career out of this work, but if some find this interesting thank God it’s them not me.

Given how hard it is to find academic positions, I would never quit because of administrative duties unless there was no escape. Enthusiasm should come back once the burden is gone.