Just before Christmas, I received an auto-response from a contact of mine which had “I heard your email” as the subject header.

This follows a post I wrote a few months ago about BMW and RIM teaming up to enable you to sync your BlackBerry with your car. However, what my friend is using is one of a couple of BlackBerry/iPhone applications that are now on the market. This particular one is called www.DriveSafe.ly and you can see a CNN segment about it here. The sales premise for DriveSafe.ly seems to run along these lines: since it’s dangerous to check your email while driving [research from the University of Utah suggests that you are 23 times more likely to crash!], then having them read to you constitutes safe driving.

I’m far from convinced about the road safety implications as I think a computerised voice reading an “urgent” message from your boss will inevitably distract you from driving. More than anything else, however, I am depressed that the desire – and ultimately the requirement – to stay on top of new email messages is bleeding into all parts of daily life. I recently worked with someone in a client context who described his drive home as precious “defrag” time where he could think over everything that had happened during the day. We are losing these valuable opportunities for our frontal cortex to indulge in a bit of deep-thinking. This has consequences I think for productivity, cognitive ability and behaviours.

Feel free to email me about this post but it’s just possible I’ll be in the car and won’t hear you…