A project coordinator from Swindon has completed a comprehensive analysis revealing that every single meeting she has attended since returning to the office in March 2022 could have been resolved via electronic correspondence, representing what she describes as a personal best in sustained corporate pointlessness.
Rachel Henderson, 34, began tracking her meeting attendance in a dedicated spreadsheet after her line manager scheduled a thirty-minute video call to discuss whether they needed to schedule another meeting. The data, which she has maintained with what colleagues describe as unsettling dedication, now spans two years and four months without interruption.
The figures make for sobering reading. Henderson has attended 1,247 meetings across the period, consuming 892 hours of her working life, or roughly 22 full working weeks. Of these, she has identified precisely zero that contained information which could not have been conveyed in a written message of fewer than 200 words.
“I think what I’m most proud of is the consistency,” Henderson said during a meeting to discuss quarterly performance reviews that could easily have been a brief email with an attached PDF. “There was one session in October 2023 where I genuinely thought we might achieve something, but then someone suggested we take the discussion offline and revisit it in a fortnight, which I’ve now classed as a statistical outlier.”
The spreadsheet itself has become something of an artwork. Henderson has colour-coded each meeting by duration, calculated the carbon footprint of colleagues driving to the office specifically to attend them, and created a separate tab estimating how many novels she could have read in the time lost. The current figure stands at 63, assuming an average reading speed and a preference for contemporary fiction rather than Russian literature.
Henderson’s manager, David Grimes, defended the meeting culture during a meeting about meeting culture. “Rachel is absolutely right that most of these could have been emails,” he acknowledged. “But I think there’s real value in having face-to-face conversations, even if those conversations are just people reading from documents that have already been circulated. It’s about building relationships and ensuring everyone feels included in conversations they have no stake in.”
Grimes added that he would be interested in seeing Henderson’s spreadsheet, and suggested scheduling time in both their calendars to go through it properly, perhaps with representatives from HR present.
Henderson has now begun a secondary analysis examining whether the meetings she attended to discuss her spreadsheet could themselves have been emails. Early indications suggest they could.