Daniel Goleman Quotes

I originally welcomed the mobile phone, as it seemed to me that it would enable you to work from anywhere. On the mobile, who was to know if you were sitting on the branch of a tree or sitting in an office? But it instead had the opposite effect: instead of freeing us from the office, it allowed the office to take away our freedom.

There are managers so preoccupied with their e-mail messages that they never look up from their screens to see what's happening in the nondigital world

Sometimes you have to disconnect to stay connected. Remember the old days when you had eye contact during a conversation? When everyone wasn't looking down at a device in their hands? We've become so focused on that tiny screen that we forget the big picture, the people right in front of us.

I wake up every morning and I feel like I'm juggling glass balls. I live in Los Angeles, my business is run out of London, and most evenings I'm cuddled up in front of Skype, in my dressing gown, speaking with my studio in London. I travel a lot, my team travel a lot, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

Nowadays we have so many things that take our attention - phones, Internet - and perhaps we need to disconnect from those and focus on the immediate world around us and the people that are actually present.

I've had jobs that allow me the flexibility to achieve work-life balance, to be there when one of the kids sinks a jump shot or for the parent-teacher meetings. I can move tasks around. If I don't get something done at the office at 4:30 in the afternoon, I can go back to it at 10:00 in the evening.

Your computer needn't be the first thing your see in the morning and the last thing you see at night.

We're getting so pulled in by computers and technology, and our kids have their face in the computers all day. The human relationship is being diminished by this.

In a digital world, there are numerous technologies that we are attached to that create infinite interruption.

People are so busy positioning themselves before the screen and talking on the damn cellphones, communicating, that we're not reading, and in fact we're not really communicating, either. We're not talking to each other. There's just all these screens and wires and technology in between.

I learned not to confuse 'busy' with 'productive,' but I'm still far too addicted to email to resist its early-morning digital snuggles.

I am really chained to my computer these days so I work in my bedroom, which is a room I have worked in for years and years. It is just as much an office as a bedroom, and during the day, my bed is rather like an extension of my desk.

I used to work for 12 or 14 hours at a time but the digital age has made such happy immersions almost impossible.

There is not a lot of separation between work and home life.

I'm not one of those people who sits at dinner on their iPhone all night. I'm either working or I'm not. I've gone down that path where you sleep with your phone beside the bed and send an email just before you put your head down and check everything again when you wake up, and I don't like it.

I'm always wondering: Have all these time-saving devices actually saved us any time, or have they just created a million fetishes and obsessions that keep us from the quiet half hour we should be taking to sit and do nothing every day?

Computers tend to separate us from each other - Mum's on the laptop, Dad's on the iPad, teenagers are on Facebook, toddlers are on the DS, and so on.

It's probably this way with a lot of professionals: At first the BlackBerry is a savior, because it makes you mobile, but then it becomes a curse, because you're at a restaurant and looking down at it under the table.

I think it's important to have flexibility to work wherever is best for you. I actually encourage people to work at the cafe - or from home or wherever works best for them.

I don't use e-mail; I phone and fax. I think people who are hunched over their computer screens all day should get a life.

When you work online, staying on the Internet more than you need to feels like being at the office after hours.

There are plenty of reasons to put our cellphones down now and then, not least the fact that incessantly checking them takes us out of the present moment and disrupts family dinners around the globe.

Almost every time I go to the ocean, I think about throwing my phone right into it. Sometimes, you pull that thing out of your pocket, you look at it, and you're like, 'What was I just going to do with this? Was I going to take a note? Was I going to check my email? Was I going to take a picture?'

As much as technology has made me so much more efficient, enabling me to run a small but global company from where I happen to be, at times it feels like the technology is running me, as opposed to the other way round.

I'll go out to eat and have a really good lunch and try to shut the phone off, but I can't, really, because the social media stuff will start happening.