There’s a WhatsApp group for my daughter’s school. A hundred and twenty messages a day minimum. Photocopies, money for the field trip, has anyone seen Lucas’s coat?, Claudia’s grandmother will bring the cookies on Thursday. An inferno.
I used to mute it and pray I wouldn’t miss anything urgent. Spoiler: I always missed something. The last time was when they changed the date of the festival and I took the girl in her costume a week late. Embarrassing.
Now I hit the AI summary button. It’s not perfect, honestly. Sometimes it lumps together things that have nothing to do with each other, or gives the same importance to a photo of a dog in a costume as to the notice that there’s no class tomorrow. But it saves me.
What I do is this: I read the summary, which is usually a paragraph. If it mentions anything about money, schedules, or changes, then I go into the original message thread and look only for that. I no longer scroll through a hundred photos of crafts and arguments about whether yellow is an appropriate color for spring.
It’s a filter. A pretty crude filter, but a filter nonetheless. What used to be half an hour of my life that won’t come back is now three minutes. Sometimes the AI gets obsessed with a trivial detail and repeats it three times. Other times, it captures the tone of a fight between two mothers and summarizes it as “an exchange of opinions.” It’s funny.
I don’t trust it blindly. But it gives me a map of the chaos. That’s enough. I’ve learned that absolute clarity doesn’t exist in a WhatsApp group, only degrees of noise. This turns the volume down enough that my head doesn’t hurt. And it lets me get there on time to pick her up, which in the end, is the only thing that matters.
