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.