I urge you: stop. Pay attention. Sit up straight and engage. Wallow in the pointlessness. Chew on this. Because you are watching the very worst version of yourself, and it’s something you need to see. Working with people can be frustrating—no "7 Tips to More Productive Meetings" article is going to make it simple. You can read 1,359 blog posts that tell you to “listen” or “empathize,” but the route to finding peace in collaborative communication is so much harder, because it’s about personal subjugation.

Meetings with colleagues are part of the creative process, not a distraction from it. To get things done, we have to work with people, and to love what we do, we have to embrace that. We are all on a journey toward being better. I suck at it. So many of you are further than me, but you aren’t there yet, because there is no "there."

On a particularly excellent episode of the popular podcast Roderick on the Line, John Roderick, frontman for the rock band The Long Winters, spent a 25-minute portion of the episode talking with about his successful experience in Alcoholics Anonymous. He reveals the kernel at the center of it all to co-host Merlin Mann, and it’s totally unexpected and something we would all do well to remember:

It’s right there, but to hit it bluntly: AA, and any other journey you take, works if you have the humility to accept that you’re just as full of shit as the guy who is rambling. 

So, yes, do all the stuff that you read about while your meeting runs painfully long. Listen rather than just waiting for your turn to talk. Empathize with the people you collaborate with and understand what motivates them. Think about what they need from the group to feel valued and make the best possible contribution. But find humility.

Don’t walk away from a bad meeting and try to implement some facile of a process change thinking it will fix “it.” Don’t think standing meetings are a panacea. Don’t assume that slavish devotion to scrum methodology or any other collaborative “-ism” is going to make your group better. To do so or think so is missing the point.

As a “how-to,” this is a horse pill, because it may require a total change in mindset. Humility is a process; it’s more like climbing a ramp than a staircase and the steps may seem as impossible as they are obvious. First, don’t let yourself zone out—it’s self-indulgent. Be self-reflective even while paying attention to every syllable of an interminable meeting. Look at your own worst impulses on display, because it’s arrogant to assume that you can take away nothing from the experience.

Second, don’t complain afterwards. It devalues what took place and squashes any possibility of growth. It also implies that your time is more important than everyone elses. Finally, resist the urge to tinker with the meeting’s format. Just because one meeting went off the rails doesn’t mean you need to change methodology. You might think you're reacting to the fact that the meeting was monopolized, but what you're really reacting to is that someone other than you monopolized the meeting for once.

Creative people are like Roderick’s description of alcoholics: We’re really great at telling everyone how it all should be done. We want to fix macro problems. In a perfect world, your newfound humility will spread like wildfire and dealing with your collaborators will become a beautiful dream. Don’t count on it. That’s also the wrong goal to start with. The only thing that you can do to guarantee better meetings and better teams is make yourself into one better participant. That requires humility in every single second, especially the ones that go the slowest.