Her coffee sat untouched. Her email inbox already had fourteen new messages. And her cursor was a spinning beach ball of doom.

The silence was so loud she laughed.

She took a sip of her coffee. It was still hot.

On Windows: Ctrl + Shift + Esc → Startup tab. A clean, cold list of every digital squatter living in her boot cycle. “High impact,” the column said next to Spotify. “Medium” for Slack. “Low” for that printer ghost. She right‑clicked each one. Disable. Disable. Disable.

“Why,” she said aloud to the empty kitchen, “does every app think it’s the most important thing in my life?”

She rebooted.

It was 7:14 AM, and Sarah’s laptop screamed to life before her eyes even focused.