Some daily-life examples to help explain what 'mindfulness' and 'mindless activity' are?

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being mindful means to at all times observe oneself in order to discern arising of unwholesome qualities and preferably nip them in the bud or, if they through one's mindlessness have managed to develop into full scale ideas, bodily and verbal acts - engender intention and resolve to refrain from them in the future

example: your co-worker receives bonus to his salary and you don't. a tide of jealousy starts building up inside your heart, then it reaches the point when you feel urge on this account to deliver sarcastic remarks at his expense and you do so, or you turn passive-aggressive and make ironical remarks about your own ostensible lack of merit. from unwholesome mental act to unwholesome verbal act: harsh speech in the first case and idle chatter - in the second

this is a snowball of unwholesomeness: from emotion/idea, to act of speech and to a possible act of body

now when you are mindful

A. the moment you start feeling jealous, you notice, acknowledge this and restrain yourself to inhibit jelousy's further growth and try to evoke an antidote quality, which in this case would be mudita or appreciative joy/cheerfulness towards that person
B. if you allowed jealousy to grow nonetheless, you acknowledge its presence, refrain from acts of speech and body driven by it and still try to replace it with an antidote quality
C. if you gave in to jealousy and, being driven by it, spoke or acted spitefully, you acknowledge the wrong-doing, repent, make resolve to not behave this way in the future, and in the future you recall this resolve of yours in similar circumstances
you also make a mental note to start developing an antidote, a wholesome oppostite quality

in the Vitakkasanthana sutta (MN 20) the Buddha advises on several strategies for warding off unwholesome thoughts and urges, and although they seem to be intended for a meditator, they can be applied to routine mental activity as well

same with the wholesome qualities only with the opposite sign:
you notice when it's lacking, try to galvanize it inside your heart right then and there or make a resolve to have more of it in the future
and when you do possess a certain wholesome quality, you notice this fact and make an effort to not lose it, and enhance and develop it further

the Teaching of the Buddha is moral and ethical in nature first and foremost, where the object of mindfulness is practitioner's own behavior and psychic activity

Mindfulness is not an end but only a means of virtue cultivation.

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Sati means it aids remembering. So if you are mindful you are aware of what is happening. So in this aspect if you pay close attention and absorbed in the movie you have mindfulness with perhaps no fantasising or other though proliferation then you are mindful.

Right mindfulness is to be mindful of the 4 Satipatthana. The essence is that you have to experience the arise of passing off sensation resulting from what you see in the movie is to your liking, disliking and neither.

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When your Buddhism teacher tells you: "don't get irritated in daily life, don't get frustrated, be the master of your mind"

-- and then you come back next day and say, "I really wanted to be a master of my mind... but then I got carried away and yelled at my wife"

and teacher says: "but this was supposed to be your main practice, to not get irritated, didn't I give you instructions?"

and you say: "somehow, in real life, when we started arguing with my wife, it looked so real and so important, and your instructions seemed so far away and so naive and irrelevant"

and the teacher says: "this means you lack mindfulness. You must hold your practice assignment in front of you at all times, it must be the main thing on your mind - whatever else you do in daily life. Develop mindfulness. Do not get carried away."

So that moment when "it looked so real and so important, and your instructions seemed so far away and so naive and irrelevant" - is when your perspective (and with it, your perception of reality and hence your judgement) has shifted by the external circumstances. If you had mindfulness, you would be able to hold your perspective the way your teacher has set it up, regardless of external pressure. So mindfulness is really a basic form of jhana, being able to control your perspective, instead of you being a slave of perspective. Mindfulness is predecessor to meditation.

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