The first time I tried to working through a power outage at home, I thought I was being efficient. Laptop fully charged. Phone nearby. Notes ready. Ninety minutes later, I realised I hadn’t produced anything meaningful.
The screen was still on. The battery indicator looked fine. But the conditions that normally allow me to think clearly were already gone. And that’s the part most people misunderstand about power outages. Work doesn’t end when electricity disappears. It unravels earlier, and for reasons that have very little to do with battery life.
Most articles about this topic treat outages as a technical problem. How many watts you need. How many hours a battery lasts. What backup device to buy. That framing misses the real constraint, which is cognitive continuity.
You don’t stop working because your laptop dies. You stop working because the system around you becomes unreliable.
What actually breaks first
In a typical home, electricity is only one layer of a stack. Internet connectivity sits on top of it, and it is far more fragile.
In many fibre and cable setups, the modem or ONT has no meaningful battery backup. When power drops, connectivity disappears almost immediately. Some routers survive longer, usually thirty to sixty minutes, but that only creates the illusion that you’re still “online”. In practice, remote servers, sync processes and real-time tools are already unreliable.
This is not a fringe scenario. ISPs themselves document this behaviour. Consumer networking gear is simply not designed for continuity.
At that point, you may still be typing, but you are no longer working in a stable system. Every action becomes provisional. You save compulsively. You hesitate before starting anything that can’t be finished quickly. That hesitation is the first real productivity loss.
Why laptops buy time but not clarity
Laptops are often presented as the obvious solution, and they are. But only partially. Yes, a laptop gives you autonomy. But autonomy is not the same as effectiveness.
Battery life estimates assume controlled conditions. During an outage, those conditions disappear. Screen brightness increases because ambient lighting is worse. CPUs run hotter because ventilation changes. Phones tethered as hotspots drain faster and overheat, something anyone who has tried this for more than an hour has experienced.
In real use, a laptop that claims ten hours rarely gives more than three or four hours of comfortable work. And even that assumes you’re doing the right kind of work.
Writing or reading can survive. Anything that requires coordination, uploads, or sustained attention degrades quickly.
Desktops, on the other hand, don’t degrade. They fail outright. Without backup power, they stop mid-sentence. That alone should tell you how thin most “work from home” setups actually are.
The hotspot myth
Mobile hotspots are usually described as a fix. They’re not. They’re a stopgap.
They work well enough to send emails or edit a document. They work badly for calls, collaborative tools or anything latency-sensitive. Networks throttle unpredictably under load. Phones heat up. Batteries drop faster than expected.
More importantly, hotspots add another unstable variable to an already unstable system. Every interruption reinforces the same internal question: should I really be doing this right now?
Once that question appears, deep work is already over.
The limit nobody measures
Here’s the uncomfortable part. In my experience, and in the experience of most people I’ve spoken to who depend on cognitive work, the hard limit during outages is not power or connectivity. It’s decision quality.
After about an hour without reliable infrastructure, thinking becomes shallow. You reread more than you write. You optimise small things instead of progressing. You avoid irreversible decisions.
This aligns with what we already know from cognitive psychology and ergonomics. Uncertainty consumes working memory. Environmental instability raises baseline stress. Neither shows up in a battery chart.
People who claim they can work “all day” during outages usually mean they stayed busy. That’s not the same as producing high-quality output.
So how long can you really work?
If you have done nothing to prepare, you might get an hour or two of decent work before friction outweighs benefit. With minimal preparation, perhaps a few hours more. With intentional infrastructure, outages stop being catastrophic and start being manageable.
The difference is not heroics. It’s systems thinking.
Once you see power outages as gradual system failures rather than on–off events, the question changes. It’s no longer “how long does my battery last?”. It becomes “how long can I maintain conditions that allow good thinking?”.
For most people, that answer is shorter than they expect.
Why this matters
Remote work assumes stability. Power outages expose how false that assumption is.
Productivity advice rarely talks about this because it’s not glamorous. There’s no app for it. But if your income depends on uninterrupted thinking, this isn’t edge-case planning. It’s baseline resilience.
The lights don’t need to stay on forever.
They just need to stay on long enough for your thinking to remain intact.
That distinction is everything.