Do you sit in meetings struggling to stay awake? Doodling in your notebook? Keeping a tick sheet of how many times the blowhard next to you says “paradigm shift” or “big picture?”

Most of us have to attend office meetings that last too long, accomplish too little, and never fail to bore the pants off of everyone in the room. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, then your average conference room is little more than a looney bin with leather-bound chairs and a projection screen.

In an era where co-workers can easily interact in real time online, why are we still spending so much time sitting around an oval table? For answers, I looked to — where else? — the Internet. I asked my Facebook “friends” how they deal with the most loathsome kind of meeting of all: The one where you have nothing to offer. Here’s what they said.

Rob Elliott: I tend to just fake it.

Sarah Peters: Intense eye contact and a lot of nodding, so at least it appears I’m listening.

Beth Sprunger: Crack jokes when other people say things that matter. Then people go away from the meeting remembering that you had a lot of input.

Sean O’Neil: Just say you were “ideating” all night and have come up with a real “future-back” AND “top-down” strategy for implementing the “piece,” but you want to make sure everyone is “on the same page” before moving forward. Then ask everyone else about their “modailty” on the project and tell them they better be thinking “outside-the-box” or they’ll be “shit-canned.” As long as you say a whole lot of nothing, you’re golden.

Sean O’Neil: That was supposed to be “modality,” but on second thought go a head and throw “modailty” at them. That will really make them feel stupid for not knowing the new corporate slang you just invented.

When I asked for further thoughts, a friend offered this defense of meetings.

Erik Styles: “I think we like to hate meetings the way we like to hate the government. It’s not that they don’t have their purpose — they just aren’t efficiently utilized. That’s why I invite Obama to all of my meetings.”

If you look at the big picture, I think the takeaway is this: We need a paradigm shift regarding meetings. While we should all strive to be team players, if we don’t bring added value to the table, we’re just wasting bandwidth. At the end of the day, many of us could better leverage our core competencies outside the conference room. Catch my drift?

Rules to meet

Marketing guru Seth Godin’s most recent book, “Tribes,” argues that human connection and interaction are essential to social and technological progress. But even he agrees that a poorly conducted meeting does more harm than good. In a recent e-mail exchange with Indy.com, he suggested nine ways to make meetings more efficient.

1. Understand that all problems are not the same. So why are your meetings? Does every issue deserve an hour? Why is there a default length?

2. Schedule meetings in increments of 5 minutes. Require that the meeting organizer have a truly great reason to need more than four increments of realtime face time.

3. Require preparation. Give people things to read or do before the meeting, and if they don’t, kick them out.

4. Remove all the chairs from the conference room. I’m serious.

5. If someone is more than two minutes later than the last person to the meeting, they have to pay a fine of $10 to the coffee fund.

6. Bring an egg timer to the meeting. When it goes off, you’re done. Not your fault, it’s the timer’s.

7. The organizer of the meeting is required to send a short email summary, with action items, to every attendee within 10 minutes of the end of the meeting.

8. Create a public space (either a big piece of poster board or a simple online page) that allows attendees to rate meetings and their organizers on a scale of 1 to 5 in terms of usefulness. Just a simple box where everyone can write a number. Watch what happens.

9. If you’re not adding value to a meeting, leave. You can always read the summary later.
This is all marketing. It’s a show, one that lets your team know you’re treating meetings differently now.

— Seth Godin