Pankaj Tanwar maps Whoop heart-rate spikes to meetings and builds a coworker stress leaderboard

A Bengaluru, India-based tech worker, Pankaj Tanwar, built a “leaderboard” that ranks coworkers and meetings by how much they raise his heart rate, using his Whoop wearable data and his work calendar. In his LinkedIn and X posts, Tanwar said he connected his Whoop wristband to his work calendar, pulled per-minute heart-rate data, and matched spikes to meetings and attendees. And, according to the project, some people have a noticeable effect on him, to the point that his screenshots showed a senior developer with a “calming effect,” while a growth manager was a “prime suspect” for higher heart rates.

Tanwar framed it as a workplace question that started as a joke: “We were all joking in a meeting about how draining some of them are,” he told Business Insider in an email. The twist is he did not stop at venting. He used the data exhaust from his own body, stitched it to the timestamped calendar, and made the answer into something he can revisit daily, saying he now has “a leaderboard, and I think about it daily.” The result is equal parts comedy and a preview of what happens when quantified-self tools collide with office dynamics.

What makes this more than a quirky personal project is the method. Whoop-style wearables measure heart rate continuously, giving per-minute data that can be aligned with specific time blocks on a calendar. Tanwar then mapped heart rate spikes to meetings and attendees, producing rankings in screenshots with some details masked. That is the core of the experiment: take an ambiguous workplace experience (stress), measure a physiological proxy (heart-rate spikes), then connect it to discrete events (meetings) and people (attendees). In other words, he turned “these meetings stress me out” into a structured dataset.

This lands right in the middle of a broader coding boom where people build software for intensely personal ideas. Business Insider describes the wave as new entrants using AI coding models to quickly produce apps. Tanwar said he used Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and Claude Opus 4.8 to build his coworker stress app. That matters because the “barrier to prototype” is falling. When more people can build small, highly specific tools fast, more workplaces will generate shadow analytics, side dashboards, and personal scoring systems that never asked for permission.

Tanwar’s project also highlights an uncomfortable truth executives already know: workplaces run on proxies. Managers often talk about morale, friction, burnout, or productivity with language that is hard to audit. Wearables change the game by producing metrics that look objective, even though they are still personal signals. For Tanwar, the proxy is his own heart-rate response. For a company, the second-order risk is obvious. If employees can quantify their stress by meeting, attendees, or routines, then “work culture” becomes something that can be reverse-engineered, compared, and potentially shared.

There is also a governance angle. The source does not mention regulation or HR involvement, but the mechanics raise predictable compliance questions. Data is personal by design: heart-rate data and behavioral context tied to work calendars are sensitive health-adjacent information. If others were to adopt similar methods at scale, boards and legal teams would immediately ask where the data is stored, whether consent is explicit, and how it is protected. Even if a tool is built “just for me,” the moment rankings point to identifiable individuals, it becomes relevant to workplace fairness and privacy norms.

For now, Tanwar’s work reads as personal analytics plus entertainment. He told Business Insider he also has a taste for other quirky side projects, and his personal website lists tools like an airplane-seat helper to avoid getting baked by the sun, a Chrome extension that makes users scream “I'm a loser” before opening social media apps, and an AI bot that likes his mom’s Instagram posts. He said: “I've got a ton of dumb fun ideas, some of them actually useful,” and that he builds because his brain finds it funny, and sometimes it ends up solving his own problems. Right now, he says he is building a wearable that will send a small zap if he sits for too long.

But the strategic stakes are bigger than the zap. Tanwar’s leaderboard is a micro-model of how work can be reframed from subjective experience to measurable events, and how AI-assisted coding accelerates that translation. If you run a team, the existence of a DIY stress dashboard should make you think about incentives and transparency. If you’re an investor, it’s a signal that personal data plus simple correlation engines are becoming mainstream. And if you’re a board member, it’s a reminder that “shadow metrics” can appear before any formal analytics program, especially when wearables and calendars make it trivially easy to align data with human activity.

The real question for executives is not whether Tanwar’s rankings are “right.” It is whether the next version of this idea will be used by more people, at more sensitive granularity, and with more social consequences. Once stress is measurable per meeting, culture stops being vibes and starts being timestamps.