What if you could see a leaderboard of the coworkers who stress you out the most? A tech worker has cobbled together a project that examines just that, leaning on heart-rate data from his Whoop health-tracking wearable.
Pankaj Tanwar, a Bengaluru, India-based tech worker, wrote in posts on LinkedIn and X that he connected his Whoop wristband to his work calendar, pulled per-minute heart-rate data, and matched spikes to meetings and attendees. In the posts, he said he now has "a leaderboard, and I think about it daily."
"We were all joking in a meeting about how draining some of them are," Tanwar told Business Insider in an email. "And it hit me, what if I could actually build something that tells me who's stressing me out?"
The posts include screenshots with some details masked, including a ranking of people or meetings tied to stress spikes. The screenshot suggested a senior developer had a calming effect on Tanwar, while a growth manager was a "prime suspect" for higher heart rates.
When asked if the results surprised him, Tanwar said: "To be honest, not really."
Tanwar's experiment lands amid a broader wave of people building quirky, highly specific software tools. Many new entrants have been using AI coding models to quickly produce new apps.
Tanwar — who has worked as a software developer, according to his LinkedIn — told Business Insider he used Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and Claude Opus 4.8 to build his coworker stress app.
And he has a taste for other quirky side projects, too.
His personal website lists an assortment of other personal software projects, including a tool that tells airplane passengers which side to sit on 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.
"I've got a ton of dumb fun ideas, some of them actually useful," Tanwar told Business Insider. "I mostly build because my brain finds it funny, and sometimes it ends up solving my own problems."
Right now, he says he's building a wearable that will send a small zap if he sits for too long.
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Ben Shimkus is a reporter for the Business News desk. He writes about cars, transportation, retail, and jobs. Ben's reporting has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Verge, Automotive News, USA Today, AutoBody News, LGBTQ Nation, TopSpeed, and Out Magazine. He's also held staff writing positions at The U.S. Sun and the Daily Mail. He graduated from NYU with a Master's in journalism in 2024. Email Ben at [email protected] or message him privately on Signal at bshimkus.41.
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