I've been in a professional career for over 30 years and I'm afraid that I have a history of being taken advantage of. If I see that something needs to be done and nobody is doing it, I'll step up. And people let me, and I don't get any recognition for it but then they start to expect it. And when I finally push back out of frustration then I'm the person with the bad attitude. Okay, this is my professional "baggage", I admit that.

The getting taken advantage has run everywhere from being inadvertently turned into tier 1 customer support (when I was a senior software engineer and again as a senior business analyst) to project manager (again for both of my actual roles).

I just started a new job recently and again I find myself getting into the same situation. I would love the perspective of management level people, which is why I'm posting this here. How can I push back on things like this without being perceived as having a bad attitude or not a team player? Again, the issue isn't that my manager asks me to do something and I want to refuse. The issue is that I'm asked to do a small task, like find out if I need to document requirements, I discover that requirements aren't needed but I get sucked into doing way, way more than I should because nobody else steps up. And I don't know who would be the correct person to handle these things so I have trouble even directing the questions/effort to the right team/person.