The Two-Hour Limit Is Doing You a Favour
· 1 min read
Cafes that post a time limit on laptops are unpopular with people who work in them, and they are usually the better rooms to work in.
A posted limit means a cafe has thought about the problem rather than hoping it goes away. It also means the tables turn over, which means there will be a seat when you arrive — the alternative, an unlimited room, is one where every table is occupied by someone who got there at nine and is not leaving.
The limits are also almost never enforced strictly. What they do is set an expectation that makes leaving easy and staying past it a conscious choice rather than an accident. In practice a two-hour room and a four-hour session coexist fine if you buy something at the two-hour mark and the room is not full.
Rooms without limits
The unlimited rooms fall into two groups. Large ones with plenty of seats, where nobody notices, and small ones where the owner has decided that a slow room is better than an unfriendly sign — and where you should be more careful, not less, because the cost of your table is highest there.
The best working rooms are usually the ones that name their rules: hours when laptops are welcome, a limit at peak, a table where cables are fine. Rules are how a room tells you what it is for. A room with no rules and no sockets is telling you the same thing more quietly.
