What one of my teams did in the past when things went off topic into an unproductive area was simply call out that it was off topic for the meeting, to shift things back to the main point. At the same time we would add it to a running list of future discussion topics, so they felt heard and the idea wouldn’t get lost, but it didn’t need to derail us in that moment. Most of the stuff we added to that list was never actually discussed later, as it was ultimately unimportant.

Sometimes the person talking would call themselves out, to have it added to the list, which was always nice. I ended up doing this a lot. An idea or issue would pop into my head, I’d bring it up, then as I was talking about it I would stop and say we should throw it in the parking lot and keep on the main topic.

We also had a weekly (maybe every other week) meeting to just talk about stuff. This gave us a forum to get into some of that oddball stuff if we needed. Having a time and place for this dramatic reduced the spill over into other meetings.