Do you want to be the sort of old-fashioned chap who leaves all the messy baby stuff to your partner, and only gets involved when your child is old enough to take to the park and play football with? We should hope not. Besides lightening the load for her, doing the mundane day-to-day tasks of looking after a baby helps reinforce the paternal bond.
How much you can do depends on your working situation. Take all the paternity leave you can get and/or afford – your partner will take several weeks to recover from the birth, so she’ll appreciate it, and you might never get another chance to take this kind of time off. You are entitled to at least two weeks. If work aren’t happy about it, stuff them. However important your work is, this is important too. They’ll cope.
During paternity leave, take on more of the physical domestic tasks like food shopping, cooking, tidying and so on. Also take a share of nappy-changing and, if you’re bottle-feeding your baby, that too (although breast milk is of course medically recommended, bottle feeding at least lets you split the workload).
When (and if - being a homedad is a perfectly acceptable choice too!) you go back to work, it’s up to you to find the balance. You’ll want to get some time with the baby anyway. But remember that just because you’ve had a tiring day at work, it doesn’t mean your partner hasn’t had just as tiring a day at home.