Ask HN: Help, I am stuck in another pointless weekly meeting

what can I do to help either make these meetings useful?

spend 15-20 minutes discussing things not related to work whatsoever before anything of value has been said.

Identify who invited you, confirm that your presence is actually required. Two important questions, what decisions will you be needed to weigh in on, and what information do they need from you.

You can ask these under the umbrella of 'meeting notes' and often you can just brief the person who invited you with the relevant facts better yet give them something to shuffle at the meeting - printed notes.

That should get you out of them.

Negotiate your way out of it, e.g. "can I just present my stuff at the beginning" or if you're really good at it, negotiate it out of existence.

Long form explanation of how to say "no" to your boss, of which this is just an instance: https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/08/16/how-to-say-no/

Two tactics:

Passive - Bring something with you to the meeting. Work items to work on while you wait, or a book etc. I am a fan of printing off technical stuff and keeping it on hand when bored. Looking busy is a good tactic to avoid the 'good idea fairy'

Aggressive - start launching into the topic. This can meet resistance 'oh hold on we are waiting for xyzzy to show up', response: I have too much work to do, call me at x1234 when you are ready to start.

Story time: I had a boss who would tried to establish a social bond with his people. He was not a techie, so there was none of that to build on. So he did the typical 'lets talk sports' because that was the only thing he knew. As such we would waste time at the weekly team meting for 15 to 20 mins. Only one guy would really engage with him. He was surprised when we all said how much we hated the wasteful weekly meeting.

What he should have done, to accomplish the social binding and understanding of what we were doing was to met each of us and talk individually. Oh well.

Ask if the person who leads it can rotate. Lead by example and demonstrate that meetings can be well run and as short as needed.