Scrum Masters and the Board

It sounds like you're in a command-and-control stage-gated environment with agile go-faster stripes sprayed on. It's not right, but it is very common.

• Have you found out who actually wants Scrum in the organization?
• What outcomes are they really expecting? Scrum is about learning, empirically, to build the right thing at the right time.
• How do they intend to create a sense of urgency for deep and systemic change, so organizational gravity is overcome?

As @Ian points out, you don't seem to be using anything from Scrum other than a few phrases.  To answer your questions from a Scrum perspective.

- How much of your time do you spend on the board in a day? 

None.  The board is for the Developers to use for radiating information about their work in a Sprint and to manage their work of achieving the Sprint Goal.

- Is it a Scrum Master's responsibility to constantly monitor the board looking for new defects? New defect are automatically placed in the current sprint because they are a priority, that's the decision taken.

See answer to the first question.  If the Developers have decided to create defects on the board, it is their responsibility to manage them because they have accepted that work as necessary to achieve the Sprint Goal.

- Do you find yourself chasing developers constantly to either assign a defect (new ones come in or failed), chase up for updates, push the developers to focus on finishing tasks faster and also chase them up for updating status and reassign to test etc  

No, because as a Scrum Master it is not my job to assign work or to monitor that work is being done. I am here to help the team learn how to benefit from empirical processes and become self-managing, self-organizing. 

As @Ian stated, you should ask the people in our organization that are championing your processes what they expect from them.  It seems like a very command-control, phased gate project management practice with a few Scrum terms thrown in to make it seem like they are being agile.  I would get them to explain it to you in more detail.

Good questions, Ian.  And thanks for your input, Daniel. 

When I question things, I am told that everyone is on board (in terms of mgt) to being agile.  But honestly, I do not see it.  I am hoping I can help turn things around.

But at the moment I am so focused on that board, I am not having time to do anything much else.  Not to mention that they seem to have meetings and meetings and honestly, it's like they think the Scrum master is the secretary to arrange meetings and take notes. I just needed to ask other SMs if they are in the same boat and how to break out of this

(I tried creating a Working agreement and putting in 'Taking ownership' among other things and I was asked what my hidden agenda was!)

Thanks

Bear in mind that to them Scrum really is hidden.

Ian, the question was asked by a BA who insists she is an expert in Agile and Scrum

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect