Back in the day I would run level 4 missions. You can do them without standing hits. As posted above, what you need to avoid is the missions that have you kill faction ships.
https://eve-survival.org/wikka.php?wakka=MissionReports
This is an excellent resource for finding out before you accept the mission if you want it or not.
There used to places that had several mission agents in close proximity that made it easy to switch to a different agent when you needed to decline a mission to avoid the four hour thing.
Also make sure you train the social skill “diplomacy” it reduces effective negative standings with NPC organizations.