BENGALURU: Most people have a gut feeling about which colleague stresses them out the most. A Bengaluru-based tech professional decided to measure it.
Pankaj, who goes by the handle @the2ndfloorguy on X, hooked his Whoop fitness tracker to his work calendar and used AI tool Fable to reverse-engineer Whoop’s data feed, pulling per-minute heart rate readings and matching spikes against scheduled meetings and their attendees. The result: a ranked leaderboard of colleagues, ordered by how dramatically each one sends his pulse racing.
“I now have a leaderboard and I think about it daily,” Pankaj wrote on X, adding that certain identifying details had been masked for obvious reasons.
The post has since amassed nearly seven million views and over 33,000 likes, striking a nerve with professionals who have long suspected that certain meetings are quite literally bad for their health.
i hooked my whoop to my work calendar to find which coworker gives me the most stress 🚨
thanks to fable, I reverse engineered whoop to pull per minute heart rate. nd matched spikes with cal events and attendees
I now have a leaderboard and I think about it daily.
The experiment is more technically involved than it sounds. Rather than relying on Whoop’s native summaries, Pankaj extracted granular per-minute heart rate data and cross-referenced it with calendar events and participant lists, effectively building a bespoke stress-attribution engine out of consumer fitness hardware and scheduling software. The methodology has attracted some scepticism, with one user pointing out that heart rate spikes can be influenced by everything from sugar intake to physical movement before a call. Pankaj has not disputed this.
The broader point, however, landed with considerable force. Workplace stress is ubiquitous, chronically under-measured and almost never attributed to specific individuals with any rigour. Pankaj has done exactly that, with a fitness band and a calendar invite.
His colleagues, one imagines, are reading the leaderboard very carefully.
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