[jonfw]

I've been in a similar boat with ops/security responsibilities getting in the way of doing development. There's two pieces of advice I would offer you that have helped me-

Being a developer just has more grunt work than I initially expected. Whether it's meetings, ops, security, mentorship, support, or whatever else- developers have to do those things. You can still frame this as development work, and you should approach it as a developer (How can I automate the task away, or make/suggest an improvement in our code, UI, or docs so that I don't have to deal with this again)

If that doesn't help you, and you don't want to leave the team on short notice, I would suggest approaching the subject with your manager again and coming up with a clear plan to get out of that work, with a timeline attached to it. There is a reason your leadership attaches timelines to work- it makes things happen. Take advantage of that, and give your leadership a timeline

[proper_elb]

Your first advice is pretty healthy and I try to do that already, but the sheer amount of workload and stress kind of keeps me in a tunnel sometimes where it is hard to think of the future (i.e. investing 3h to write a script). But it absolutely is the smart thing to do and I think my problem is setting boundaries - I noticed that one collegue that I think is equal in talent kind of rose beyond me, mostly because he would just take his time and do the right thing. I want to work on that.

I also like your second suggestion, suggesting a timeline and idealy some quantifiable goal.