One of the surprising realities for PIs is the sheer amount of administrative work involved in the role. Many stay in academia for the potential to pursue their research interests, yet end up finding their days filled with emails, meetings, paperwork, and countless other administrative tasks. One of my clients recently referred to the job as “47 rats in a trench coat.” If you don’t know what they meant by this, you’ve somehow escaped the administrative chaos. For now. 

In the past, universities provided faculty at all levels with access to skilled assistants who could deftly help keep all the rats in the trench coat. These days, admin support often isn’t provided until you’ve brought in some level of external funding or taken on a specific leadership role. Even then, admin personnel might be shared across multiple faculty members. This might mean you have to handle some or all of the administrative tasks associated with your research program and your position. As a result, you may find yourself struggling to balance your research and the activities you want to do, with the myriad administrative tasks that claim your time and energy. 

What’s more: as your research scales, these tasks also scale. In the recent book, Slow Productivity, author Cal Newport states that every new knowledge project (e.g., could be a new research line, but could also be developing a grant application) comes with an administrative overhead—meetings and emails to gather info, share progress, troubleshoot, collaborate, etc.—that is ongoing across the duration of the project. In other words, these tasks carry forward day to day, and they introduce a cognitive load that you carry even if you are only infrequently doing the administrative work. Ideally, you want to delegate some of these tasks to reduce both your actual effort and your cognitive load.

But, what if it seems you can’t delegate? In one of our workshops, we ask participants to identify which of their tasks could be delegated to someone else, and frequently the response is, “There are a bunch of things I could and would like to delegate, but I don’t have someone to delegate them to. So I feel stuck with having to do all of this stuff.” We absolutely know what this situation is like (we’ve experienced it, too), and we’re glad to say that there are ways to minimize the impact that admin tasks have on you and your cognitive load, even when you can’t delegate to someone else yet.

Below are 4 practical tactics and some example tools to help you navigate the administrative load. Please note, that the technological tools we describe aren’t necessarily an endorsement of any particular tool, and we aren’t gaining anything by sharing them. We ask clients and workshop participants to share resources that make their work easier, and we want you to benefit from this info.

Prioritize and Streamline Tasks: Use a Time-Blocking Approach

At its core, the challenge with administrative work is that it often feels urgent, pulling you away from your research and creative thought. The desire to remove these items from your to-do list so you can stop thinking about them can outweigh the worry that you’re not making progress on your own priorities. But the reality is that you have a finite amount of time, and if you don’t create boundaries, you’ll find yourself spending more hours on administration than necessary and trying to cram in your priorities wherever you can.

One practical solution is time-blocking—a scheduling strategy where you assign specific blocks of time to different tasks. For example, you can dedicate two hours each morning or afternoon to admin tasks like answering emails, scheduling meetings, or submitting expense reports. This helps create mental boundaries between administrative and research time, preventing the former from bleeding into your research hours. 

One critical aspect is to actually stop what you’re working on when the time block ends—otherwise, you’re running straight over your own boundary and depriving yourself of progress on your other activities. 

Tip: Consider using digital tools like Trello, Asana, Monday, or one of many other project management tools to organize and track your administrative tasks so that you have a clear understanding of what needs to be done. These tools can also help with delegation (more on that later) and ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

Automate for Efficiency

Implementing processes can help you gain efficiencies. And one key way to do this is to automate and streamline routine tasks. Where possible, use technology to automate things that can be automated (e.g., calendar), and put others on “autopilot”—meaning you reduce the cognitive burden by not having to think about what to do and when or how to do it. 

• Email Automation: Tools like Google’s Canned Responses or Outlook’s Quick Parts allow you to save and reuse email templates, cutting down on time spent answering similar queries or scheduling meetings. Tools like Boomerang also allow you to schedule emails or set reminders to follow up, keeping correspondence efficient and organized.
• Calendar Management: Instead of going back and forth to find meeting times, use scheduling tools like Calendly or YouCanBook.me, which allow others to book available slots directly from your calendar. This eliminates the need for countless email exchanges just to set up a single meeting.
• Expense Reports: Tools like Expensify can help you easily scan and submit expense reports on the go, preventing the paperwork from piling up.
• Create Routines: Implementing a routine for a task or activity, especially one you dread or one that keeps falling through the cracks, can reduce your mental load around that task and enable you to complete it more regularly. For example, perhaps you have multiple ongoing collaborations for different research lines. Create a routine around compiling progress on a particular project on the same day each month. Perhaps take your laptop to your favorite quiet spot, with your favorite beverage, and do a brain dump on progress. Consider using an AI tool to summarize the brain dump (be careful with using open-source tools if you might have intellectual property involved), and pop the summary into an email template to make it easy to send progress updates to your colleagues. 

By automating and autopiloting as much as possible, you can free up your time and brain space for high-impact work and minimize the toll of routine administrative tasks.

Delegate Where Possible (Even Without an Admin)

Early on, you might not have a dedicated administrative assistant, but that doesn’t mean you can’t delegate tasks to other team members or collaborators. Delegation doesn’t always have to mean handing things off to a junior colleague—sometimes, it can be as simple as assigning certain responsibilities within a team.

For example:

• Research management: If you’re leading a lab or research team, you can assign a senior research assistant or postdoc to take on some of the administrative duties like onboarding new members, maintaining lab inventory, or handling scheduling within the team. In fact, creating a team structure with delegated tasks is really important for allowing your projects and team to scale in a sustainable way, and it gives team members a chance to grow in a new direction as well.
• Collaborations: Within a research collaboration, each team member might have different strengths. Assign administrative responsibilities to those who are naturally organized and skilled at logistics. This allows you to focus more on leadership and strategy while others manage the day-to-day operations.

Make sure that everyone involved in your projects is clear about their roles and expectations. Transparent and clear communication and written agreements (even if informal) can ensure that tasks get done without anyone feeling overburdened.

Set Boundaries and Learn to Say “No”

Many early- and mid-career professionals struggle with setting boundaries, especially when they are eager to prove themselves or establish their reputation. However, saying “yes” to every opportunity, collaboration, or request can quickly lead to burnout.

One of the most effective ways to minimize your administrative burden is to get comfortable with saying “no” to tasks and requests that don’t directly align with your goals or priorities. This doesn’t mean turning down every opportunity, but it does mean being strategic about what you agree to take on. One key to remember here is that most opportunities are not “once in a lifetime,” so don’t let FOMO get the better of you.

Before saying yes to a new committee, project, or administrative task, come up with a set of questions to guide your decision process. For example:

• Does this directly align with my research or professional goals?
• Will this task require more time and energy than I can realistically give?
• How will saying yes to this affect my other ongoing activities?
• Is there someone else on my team or in my network who is better suited to take this on?

Saying no can feel uncomfortable, especially early in your career, but it’s a crucial skill to develop if you want to maintain focus and energy for the tasks that matter most. By managing your commitments carefully, you can reduce the number of “rats” you have to wrangle and make space for creative, high-impact work.

Conclusion: You Don’t Have to Do It All

Balancing research with administrative duties is an inevitable challenge for early- and mid-career researchers. While the administrative burden can feel overwhelming, it’s possible to navigate this period by strategically managing your time, leveraging tools, and learning to delegate and set boundaries.

Remember, the administrative side of your role is not going away, but with the right approach, you can manage it without letting it dominate your day. The key is to focus on what you do best—your research—and find ways to streamline and offload the rest so that you can continue to innovate and thrive in your academic career.

By mastering these strategies, you’ll reduce stress and position yourself for long-term success, no matter how many projects, collaborators, or team members you add to the mix.