The pebbles of academia

I have just been awarded a certificate for successful completion of the Conflict of Interest Commitment training (I barely passed). Lately, I have been totally swamped by administrative duties and have had little time for actual research. The experience reminded me of something I read in this NYTimes article by Tyler Cowen

Michael Mandel, an economist with the Progressive Policy Institute, compares government regulation of innovation to the accumulation of pebbles in a stream. At some point too many pebbles block off the water flow, yet no single pebble is to blame for the slowdown. Right now the pebbles are limiting investment in future innovation.

Here are some of the pebbles of my academic career (past and present): financial conflict of interest training , human subjects training, HIPAA training, safety training, ethics training, submitting papers online, filling out copyright forms, faculty meetings, center grant quarterly meetings, 2 hour oral exams, 2 hour thesis committee meetings, big project conference calls, retreats, JSM, anything with “strategic” in the title, admissions committee, affirmative action committee, faculty senate meetings, brown bag lunches, orientations, effort reporting, conflict of interest reporting, progress reports (can’t I just point to pubmed?), dbgap progress reports, people who ramble at study section, rambling at study section, buying airplane tickets for invited talks, filling out travel expense sheets, and organizing and turning in travel receipts. I know that some of these are somewhat important or take minimal time, but read the quote again.

I also acknowledge that I actually have it real easy compared to others so I am interested in hearing about other people’s pebbles? 

Update: add changing my eRA commons password to list!