An India-based software developer has built a system that cross-references heart-rate data from a wearable fitness tracker with his work calendar, producing what amounts to a private leaderboard of the colleagues and meetings that stress him out the most.
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There are workplace grudges, and then there is this: quietly letting your body keep score.
The developer, identified as Pankej Tanwar, said he connected data from a WHOOP wearable to his calendar and compared minute-by-minute heart-rate spikes with the meetings on his schedule. The result was a ranking system that estimates which co-workers and recurring conversations have the strongest physiological effect on him. In plain English, he built software to figure out who at work makes his pulse jump.
It sounds like a joke because, at least in part, it was. Tanwar said the idea came after co-workers were talking about draining meetings. That kind of office complaint is nearly universal. Everyone has some version of it, the weekly check-in that could have been a paragraph, the person who turns every update into a hostage situation, the manager whose voice alone seems to make the room’s oxygen thinner. Most people grumble and move on. Tanwar treated the irritation like a design challenge.
That is what makes the project more than a novelty. It sits in the increasingly crowded territory where consumer biometrics, workplace culture, and cheap coding power all overlap. Wearables already track sleep, recovery, exertion, and stress. Calendar apps know where you are supposed to be and when. AI coding tools now let developers spin up odd little side projects far faster than they could a few years ago. Once all three ingredients exist in the same room, it was only a matter of time before someone built a meeting-anxiety scoreboard.
The details are unusually specific, which is part of the charm. Tanwar reportedly matched heart-rate spikes against meetings and participants, then turned the output into rankings. Some colleagues were associated with calmer responses. Others landed closer to the danger zone. Asked if the results were surprising, he said they were not, which is arguably the funniest possible answer. The software did not reveal hidden truths. It mostly confirmed office suspicions he already had.
That makes the project feel less like hard science and more like quantified pettiness, though not in a bad way. Office life runs on informal emotional math. People know which Slack notification makes their shoulders rise. They know whose name on a calendar invite means the next hour will be useless. Most organizations dress this up in sterile corporate language about collaboration and alignment. A wearable does not bother with that. It just notices your heart trying to leave the building.
There are obvious limitations. A heart-rate spike during a meeting does not necessarily mean a specific co-worker is the cause. Stress can come from deadlines, caffeine, poor sleep, family issues, or the simple fact that too many people are talking at once on Zoom. Wearables are useful, but they are not mind readers. Any serious attempt to turn this into an HR product would become a legal and ethical swamp in record time. Nobody wants a boss explaining that quarterly review scores now include biometric dread.
Still, as a personal experiment, it is a nearly perfect artifact of contemporary work. White-collar jobs increasingly generate enormous volumes of low-level emotional friction without ever looking dramatic enough to justify complaint. Very few people are getting screamed at in the old-fashioned way. Instead, they sit through six meetings about a document nobody will read, while a smartwatch silently concludes they are living in a war zone.
Tanwar’s broader collection of side projects makes the whole thing even better. He reportedly has built tools for choosing airline seats based on sun exposure, a browser extension that forces users to yell “I’m a loser” before opening social media, and a bot that interacts with his mother’s Instagram posts. Those are not the projects of someone trying to launch a sober software empire. Those are the projects of a developer who understands that the line between problem-solving and messing around has become very thin.
That may be the quiet story here. Coding is no longer reserved for large corporate software teams building giant products. With AI assistance, more people can turn fleeting jokes into functioning prototypes. The old gap between “someone should make that” and “I made that over the weekend” is collapsing. Some of the results will be useful. Some will be stupid. The interesting ones, like this stress-ranking project, will usually be both.
There is a reason stories like this travel. They tap a common fantasy: that work could be forced to reveal itself honestly. Not through a survey, not through management slogans, not through another “wellness” initiative with clip-art breathing exercises. Through data. Ugly, petty, involuntary data. The body keeps its own minutes, and sometimes those minutes are more candid than the official ones.
For readers who already enjoy the weirder edge of workplace and tech culture, or listeners who found the story through this comedy podcast, that is the appeal. The app is funny. The idea is petty. The premise is suspiciously relatable.
😈 Distorted View Take
The show cuts straight to the practical summary of the whole project:
“He’s basically created a leaderboard of coworkers who stressed slash annoy him.”
Then Tim immediately sees where this kind of thinking could go:
“Now, the one that I do remember is Uber Holes.”
And naturally the innovation pipeline ends somewhere painful:
“It’s called piggy prod.”
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