If someone could figure out a four letter word for meeting, most of the engineers I know would probably choose to use it. At my current employer we have a term that I would imagine gets used lots of places... "meetnapping."
So, as engineers we have to effectively manage the time we spend in the office so that when we do attend meetings, it's providing as much or more value to our organization than other coding or design work we can concentrate on.
One way to help ensure you're not the victim of a meetnapping is to insist on an agenda being delivered to you prior to your attendance at a meeting. The agenda should have enough information in it - including the intended purpose of the meeting - for you to decide whether or not you could provide value to the meeting. It also works the other way around, a proper agenda should also inform you if attending the meeting will provide you with any insights you need to work on your current task list.
The same courtesy should be afforded to others that you wish to schedule a meeting with. If the people you invite to a meeting can't quickly understand the purpose of the meeting you have invited them to through the title, then the next best option is to provide a brief and well organized agenda. Here's the tricky part. Stick to the agenda you laid out, because once you've provided an agenda you've created a "meeting interface" - no fair implementing additional methods that you didn't specify in your interface to begin with. And especially no fair (heck - it's a compiler error) not implementing the methods you specified in your contract to begin with. Think of your agenda like a coding interface, and suddenly it becomes much more clear how it's useful (at least in my mind).
The best chance you have in sticking to an agenda is to bring a wingman with you. As the organizer of a meeting, it's fairly easy to get distracted into other side topics that you may feel are related to the topic at hand, but that may not provide immediate value to the other attendees of the meeting. This is where it helps to have someone come with you that you can trust to keep you on track. Make sure this person has a copy of the agenda. And make sure you trust them to interrupt you if you stray from it or start taking too long on a given subject.
While these strategies won't eliminate meetings from your schedule altogether, it can help you more efficiently decide which meetings to attend and also give you a good reason to tell your boss that a certain meeting is probably outside the scope of your responsibility.
Another good rule of thumb that most managers and healthy teams will usually willingly stick to is to schedule meetings surrounding natural breaking points in the day. Have your meetings not long after you get in to the office (not my favorite, but it works for some people), right before lunch, right after lunch, or at the end of the day. That way the "manager hours" that require meetings and the "engineer hours" that work best when you get uninterrupted work time have a better likelihood of positively interacting with one another. As another rule of thumb - if you want to attend only one meeting per week, schedule it at 3PM on Tuesday. Though I can't cite them here, I've read several studies that suggest this is the absolutely perfect time for having a meeting. (I realize this is pretty ludicrous, I have 4 meetings on my calendar for tomorrow already.)
