Hello, and welcome back. Today we'll be talking about emailing and other forms of electronic communication. Now you may be wondering to yourself, why would we be spending time talking about something so mundane, so common as emailing? 

Well, it is actually because it is so common that often people can do it on autopilot. In other words, do it without thinking. If you've ever had the experience where you've sent something, and then gone, Ah, where's that recall function? Or perhaps you've received something and you've said, I'm quite sure this person did not mean to send me this email. 

And perhaps you'll agree that there really is an opportunity to look at ways of increasing mindfulness in our emailing activities. So today, we'll be talking about three things. First of all, we'll look at your own experience with email. And then we'll talk about some statistics. 

Thirdly, we'll get into how can we create more mental space? How can we improve our ability to be more mindful and using these electronic tools of communication? So to get started, I'd like to ask you two simple questions. The first one is, how much time do you spend on emails a day 10% of your time 20% of your time 30% of your time. Recent research has suggested that on average, people spend at least 28% of their time on emails every day. That's quite a lot of time that you invest. So the second question is, how do you feel about emails, if it is something that you spend quite a bit of your time on?

It's interesting to just explore what is your relationship with your inbox, many people that we talk to have a bit of a love hate relationship with their inbox. Although on the one hand, they really appreciate the fact that they can send messages to people and read rest messages from people anywhere, anytime. They also feel that their inbox becomes a bit of a burden, constantly filling up never been able to keep up. The other aspect of emails that people often talk about, they describe it as a bit of a necessary evil. They are in fact, a very poor form of communication. When you think about it, they're only one way, they don't have the opportunity for all the visual or verbal cues that we use to be able to communicate tone and intentions. 

So in fact, although it's something that we use quite a lot, and we invest a lot of our precious time on, it's interesting in terms of how really effective it is for us at any given point in time. Looking at time, I just want to explore some stats on emails, and maybe I'll start off with some simple questions for you to consider. So the first question is, do you ever check your emails while you're on vacation? According to research, 60% of people check their email on vacation. Another question is, how often? Or how long can you go before you have to check your inbox? According to research, 25% of people cannot go without email for more than three days. 

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