WHOOP is a wearable band that can track a wide variety of data points, including HRV (heart rate variability), heart rate, skin temperature, and a whole array of metrics.

It's something that millions of people have started to wear because they want to be able to coordinate some of their health metrics and get a recovery score from the day. The recovery score is based on all of your strain scores and metrics that are tracked throughout the day, as well as a sleep score to give you an idea of how well recovered you are.

In this review, I wanted to share my own experience of using WHOOP and whether it's anything good for productivity and how it can be utilized for that aspect. Obviously, your health has a very important factor on how you work and manage your mental capacity every single day. This is something that allowed me to be a lot more proactive about how I was spending my time as well.

Top Features for Productivity

Here are the things I enjoyed about WHOOP for productivity & health:

Recovery Scores: Every day, you get a recovery score, a percentage indicator of how well-rested you are. This gives you an idea of how far you can push yourself based on all of the attributes and algorithms they've created. This is helpful for productivity, especially if your recovery score is considerably low (between maybe 10 and 30), as it indicates not to stress yourself out too much or overload yourself. It encourages increasing HRV and keeping yourself hydrated across your workday.
Sleep Analytics: This feature helps you to break down how effective your sleep has been and your sleep performance, as well as something called sleep debt, which can be really helpful for making sure that you're keeping track of how much you're sleeping and that you're not in debt from sleep. This can be detrimental to things like your productivity at work in the long term. Having good quality sleep, and a sufficient amount of it, is very helpful and has assisted me over time.
Stress Monitors: This is a more recently released feature, but it indicates how stressed you are during a day, giving you a score that fluctuates based on the variables. This can be a good indicator and help you analyze what moments in the day make you particularly stressed, aiding in improvement, as well as ensuring you keep hydrated and manage other aspects and things.

Is WHOOP worth it for productivity?

WHOOP is quite an expensive piece of software.

It comes with a free wearable band, but the pricing per month is $30, which is expensive for someone who might be able to get a fitness band in one-off or even pay something considerably lower for a premium service like Fitbit Premium, which gives you similar metrics but doesn't have quite the intense features that WHOOP does.

So, the investment for this is quite high because you have to commit to about 12 months. I started using WHOOP in 2020 just before having my first child, and I found the first six months very stressful primarily because everything is situated around something called a recovery score. Because I was getting little to no sleep during that time, I actually found that my recovery score was always in the red, and it did put me off, which is an important factor when using it. However, after many years of using it and during a break period as well, I found that understanding the metrics behind it as well as how I can tailor and push my efforts during the day with habits, routines, and health towards improving those metrics can be detrimental to how you do and manage your day.

For example, I was using WHOOP analytics to improve my HRV over the last three months using improved sleep, better hydration, and more intense workouts spread across a week, whilst listening to my recovery score as well as a bunch of other statistics that I learned, like the ability to use a humidifier during sleep and to make sure to get consistent sleep-wake times, and I consider it would be better during that period. It wouldn't be without my research combined with the metrics that has helped me to do that, but essentially, using WHOOP has helped me to improve my productivity because I am able to push myself now not when I know that I need to be recovering based on my metrics and also to make sure that I continually monitor my HRV, which will help improve my day-to-day scores as well as my productivity.

Things like hydration, making sure you get good sunlight, and morning routines are all good variables when using a health tracker like this. So, I would say, while it is an investment, the health, especially if you're a freelancer or work for yourself, can be quite a decent one at that.

WHOOP platforms