Valuable as it is, attention is also easy to squander. When taking in information, our minds are terrible at discerning between the significant and the trivial. So if we're trying to work out a dense mental problem in our heads and our phone pings, we will pay attention to the ping automatically and stop focusing on the mental problem. That weak attentional filter is a bigger shortcoming in the smartphone era than ever before.

This past year’s 6% growth is down from 11% in 2016. As we reported last year, users now spend more than five hours a day on their smartphones, and shift their daily time spent between new and old app experiences, versus giving more of their overall daily time.