If, like us, you find yourselves working from home at the moment, you may have noticed various titbits of advice on social media over the past few weeks. Working from home? You must keep a strict routine. Maintain productivity. Boost morale by making your working life as sophisticated and smart as it was many moons ago, when you would proudly fold yourself onto a sweaty Tube for 47 minutes before spending all of your precious daylight hours in a faceless office near a roundabout.

Of course, you may well have failed in this challenge in some respects. The area you now call your office (your coffee table, perhaps, or the patch of cement outside your house that an estate agent generously called a “garden”) has become populated with empty crisp packets – who knew snacking was an actual hobby that you could improve at? In lieu of a proper desk, your laptop is perched precariously on a tower of books in a vain attempt to stop the onset of sciatica. And you now see minor tasks such as taking the bins out as gleaming jewels of possibility in an otherwise humdrum daily schedule.

Despite all of this, there is every chance that you are still dressing like a human being with a job. It’s the easiest thing in the world: to wake up and get dressed, like you still have a normal occupation. It can give you a psychological fillip, after all. And in a world of Zoom, WebEx, Google Hangout and all manner of applications that allow your colleagues to invade your personal space and see what bits of your personality you hang on your walls via the medium of in-built laptop cameras, it may well be sort of necessary. Even if you have become barely sentient in quarantine – it’s probably best you don’t let on to your boss that you now have scurvy and don’t know what actual things are anymore.

But there is another way. A path of true devotion. Switch off your camera. Claim it isn’t working, or that it is in contravention of information privacy law. Stock up on crisps. Lock your doors. Now, it is time to truly wallow in your government-enforced at-home isolation. You won’t get this opportunity again. Forget “trousers” and “belts” and “shirts”. What are those? They have no value in an economy where toilet roll, game consoles and non-perishable foods are golden. This is the time to get really, really into sweatpants, cosy sweaters and comfy socks. Literally and figuratively.