HACKING ATTENTION
Sam Engström
Sam Engström founded his first company when he was eighteen years old and that company is now the Finnish market leader in construction site cameras. His latest endeavour Timespace is helping people focus by combining aspects of mindfulness to practical productivity.
Sam Engström discusses how modern devices bring distractions closer, presenting three types:
A better approach is to train the mind. Consciously place your focus on whatever it is you are doing; over time, the mind gets stronger at resisting distractions, allowing you to focus on what is truly important to you.
Summary
- Distractions originate from three main sources: the internal racing mind, digital tools that expose us to irrelevant data, and external factors like social media and other people. - Training the mind's ability to shift attention via meditation is more effective than trying to impose control over external distractions, which is the layer we have the least control over. - Attaching all relevant content directly to a specific focused activity prevents the common distraction of getting sidetracked when searching through apps or email for necessary details. - Sharing your current focus with others allows them to access status updates and files independently, reducing the need for interruptions that break concentration. - Quantifying attention by combining mental focus data with physiological metrics like stress and activity levels offers life-changing insights into how different tasks impact the body.
Article
Hacking Attention: Training The Mind And Quantifying Focus
At Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki, Sam Engström Argued That The Real Frontier Of Productivity Was Not Time Management But Attention Itself
On a brisk October afternoon at **Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki**, **Sam Engström** stood before an audience primed to hear about data, performance and self-optimisation, and made a deceptively simple case: our greatest battle was not with time, but with attention.
Engström, an entrepreneur whose latest venture **Timespace** sought to merge mindfulness with practical productivity, framed distraction not as a minor nuisance of modern life but as one of its defining conditions. “The devices we use are bringing distractions closer to us, closer to our skin, and we are wearing them all the time,” he said, capturing in one sentence the intimacy of the modern problem. Technology, once parked on a desk, had migrated to the pocket, the wrist, the body.
His talk, **Hacking Attention**, did not settle for the familiar complaint that phones and notifications had ruined concentration. Instead, it offered a more layered diagnosis, and a more interesting remedy.
The Three Sources Of Distraction
Engström divided distraction into three broad sources.
The first was internal. “The mind is naturally in a place where thoughts are racing about, and it is easy to get sidetracked and lost chasing all of those thoughts,” he said. In this view, distraction did not begin with the smartphone buzz. It began in consciousness itself, in the restless, darting movement of thought.
The second source lay in the architecture of digital work. Most tools, he argued, were built around content types rather than human intention. An email app contained emails, a chat app contained messages, a drive contained files. But a person trying to complete a task rarely needed all emails, all messages or all files. They needed only the handful relevant to what they were doing.
That mismatch created a daily trap. Open an inbox to retrieve one important detail, and a dozen competing demands flooded in. Search for a file, and unrelated material clamoured for notice. Productivity systems, in other words, often sabotaged the productivity they promised.
The third source came from the outside world: social media, co-workers, friends, family, messages, requests, interruptions. These were the classic hijackers of focus, the visible enemies in the war for concentration.
Why Blocking The World Was Not Enough
Engström’s sharpest insight was that most attempts to solve distraction focused on the layer people controlled least. “When we try to solve the problem of distractions, we often try to block out the external world,” he said. “We are imposing control over the type of distraction that we really have the least control over.”
That line landed because it named a familiar futility. People installed blockers, muted alerts, switched off apps, reorganised desks. Yet new distractions always arrived. The battle was endless because it remained external, reactive and incomplete.
Meanwhile, the mind itself remained untrained, still racing, still vulnerable, still ready to be carried off by the next thought.
Meditation As Mental Strength Training
For Engström, the answer began not with stronger walls but with a stronger mind. Meditation, he suggested, was less a retreat from modern life than a practical training ground for surviving it.
“You are not trying to block thoughts from coming, but you remain aware of the object of focus and come back to it,” he said. “This helps you resist distractions because they are just thoughts imposed on you by the outside world.”
It was a quietly radical reframing. Focus was not the absence of interruption. It was the repeated act of return.
In meditation, the chosen anchor might be the breath, an image or a bodily sensation. Thoughts arise, attention drifts, awareness notices, focus returns. The value of the exercise lay precisely in that return. Over time, it strengthened the capacity to choose where the mind rested.
Engström’s argument was that this meditative quality need not remain sealed inside a formal practice session. It could be carried into ordinary life, into work, planning, communication and decision-making.
Building Workflows Around Focus
That proposition sat at the heart of **Timespace**, the platform Engström presented in Helsinki. The idea was to anchor attention to a specific activity and then attach all relevant content directly to that focus.
Instead of hunting through disconnected digital territories for the materials a task required, users could place the task itself at the centre and organise around it. This reduced context switching, that subtle but exhausting mental tax that accumulates each time a person moves between apps, tabs, threads and platforms.
The concept was practical rather than mystical. If focus could be consciously placed, then workflows could be designed to protect it. If all relevant notes, files, updates and messages travelled with the task, the user was less likely to be pulled off course by irrelevant information.
There was also a social dimension. By sharing one’s current focus with others, Engström suggested, colleagues could retrieve status updates or documents without interrupting. A simple question such as “Where did you put that file?” might no longer fracture concentration if the answer was already embedded in a shared activity space.
It was a modest shift with larger implications: fewer interruptions, less friction, more sustained attention.
Quantifying Attention As A Biological Asset
What elevated Engström’s talk beyond another productivity pitch was his final move into measurement. If biohacking had long been obsessed with tracking sleep, steps, heart rate and recovery, why not track attention with the same seriousness?
“When you combine your mental focus with measurements from your body, that is when you can really get some of those life-changing insights,” he said.
This was the language of self-quantification, but turned inward in a more nuanced way. Attention, in Engström’s telling, was not merely a mental state. It was something that could be logged, compared and studied alongside physiological data such as stress levels and activity.
The result was not just a prettier dashboard. It was a deeper understanding of how different parts of life acted upon the body. A commute might turn out to be the day’s main source of physical activity. Certain work tasks might correlate with elevated stress. Other activities might leave the body passive, depleted or overstimulated.
By placing mental focus beside biometric evidence, attention became legible as a biological variable, not just a psychological complaint.
A Broader Biohacking Question
There was an irony in the message delivered at **Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki**. The same culture that celebrated wearables and constant measurement had also helped normalise the hyperconnected environment draining human attention. Engström did not reject that culture. He challenged it to mature.
If devices had brought distraction closer to the skin, then the next task was not simply to buy more devices. It was to develop the inner and structural conditions for using them wisely.
His talk suggested that the future of optimisation would not belong solely to those who measured more, but to those who understood what deserved to be measured in the first place. Attention, so often squandered and so rarely examined with care, emerged as both the scarce resource and the hidden metric.
In the end, Engström offered something more humane than a life hack. He proposed that focus could be trained, protected and understood. In a culture built to fracture awareness, that idea felt not just useful, but quietly insurgent.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki