If your approval is required, your availability becomes part of everyone else’s workload.

Once your sign-off is required, your calendar becomes everybody else’s dependency. Work sits finished but unmovable, people arrange their week around your availability, and none of that delay appears in your own workload, because it is happening to other people. From the inside it feels like being busy. From outside it looks like a queue.

Look at what genuinely needs your judgement and hand the rest back with a rule attached: go ahead unless it costs more than this, or carries more risk than that. Then leave it alone, including the parts you would have done differently.