[nradov]

You're not wrong, but university professors don't necessarily have the authority or budget to hire assistants. And much of the stuff they deal with absolutely requires their unique skills: delegation leads to errors and omissions with serious consequences.

[ninalanyon]

Then they have to use what power they have and simply partition the workload into what must be done that is actually doable and the rest. The rest gets done if there is time, otherwise it just gets dropped.

If the institution wants more work done that there is time for in a normal working day then they simply have to hire more people like any normal company would do. If the institution cannot afford to hire more people then it simply has to admit that there are limits to what it can commit to doing.

This is what unions are for.

[nradov]

That's not how it works in any sort of job with significant individual responsibility. The institution isn't forcing them to do more work. They take it on voluntarily because they're ambitious or competitive or want to advance a worthy cause. Doing the bare minimum is possible: some people make that choice, and even without a union it usually won't get you fired. But those people usually don't accomplish much. You can't have it both ways.

[pharx]

But if they are ambitiously overloading their schedule with task they can’t handle on their own, they don’t get to complain about the workload they voluntarily signed up for.

And that’s even beside the point as email in not to blame. They would still be voluntarily overloaded in the era of snail mail with letters stacking up on their table.

[ptero]

> university professors don't necessarily have the authority or budget to hire assistants.

Agreed, hiring in academia is both painful and tricky. But someone running a grad program for the department and who is as overloaded as the author with other duties is well placed to advocate for a secretary or a grad assistant to lighten his non-core duties.

> And much of the stuff they deal with absolutely requires their unique skills: delegation leads to errors and omissions with serious consequences.

More than for a bus driver, nurse, cook, physical therapist, etc., etc., etc.? The world is full of people who volunteer and self-assign tasks to their breaking point; then burn themselves out. They feel that they can do X best, so they convince themselves that they must. With very few exceptions, this is BS and a non-productive path to burnout. Don't be like that.