How do you adapt to working from home, keep fit, maintain a social life – and maybe even cut your hair?

How to keep your hair in check – Sali Hughes

Social media is awash with professional colourists pleading with absent clients not to reach for the box dye while they’re closed for business. This is partly because, like every service profession, hairdressing will take a financial beating during this crisis.

But professionals are also genuinely worried about their clients’ hair, and tell me they’re bracing themselves for a plethora of complex colour correction appointments when they finally reopen. “Colour correction can be a long, drawn-out and expensive process,” warns Luke Hersheson, my own stylist and creative director of Hershesons in London. “Until we know when salons might reopen, it’s much safer to use a temporary fix, like a root touch-up spray or powder that shampoos out,” he says.

He believes many women can buy a few more weeks by just changing where they part their hair. There’s usually more grey at the temples, so a centre parting is a good stopgap.

Top salon colourist Josh Wood isn’t against box dyes – he even sells them under the Josh Wood Colour brand in Boots. However, the secret to a successful home dye job, he says, is in knowing your limitations. “Now is not the time to transform the colour of your hair, or for tricky techniques like balayage, ombre or bleaching,” he says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Try a root disguiser to touch up your hair colour, Sali Hughes suggests. Photograph: Rui Faria/The Guardian

Retouching roots or toning existing colour should be the extent of your ambition as an amateur. Wood suggests applying a moisturising hair mask a couple of days before colouring, and “always choosing dye in one shade lighter than you think you need from the picture”, as too dark is impossible to correct. Follow the box instructions to the letter, Wood says, “starting at the greyest point – usually the front – and cover roots for twice the length of time as the lengths”. He suggests enlisting your spouse or teen to do the back.

In any case, you must always, always do a skin test in advance, according to instructions, to minimise the risk of potentially serious allergic reaction. It can be a lifesaver.

Hersheson (whose team, like Wood’s, is offering video consultations during the crisis) points out that it’s worth considering whether social isolation might be a good opportunity to push through the pain barrier of transitioning to grey. “It’s also a good time to grow out an unwanted fringe – you can clip it back and not worry about how that looks, and not have the stress of trimming it yourself,” he says.

Hersheson counsels against trimming your fringe, unless you’re very adept. But I have trimmed dozens of fringes in extremis, and if you think you’re up to the job, here’s my own technique:

Always start with clean, but dry hair – never, ever cut when wet or even damp. Clip back the rest of your hair, leaving the dry fringe isolated and loose.

Comb through, and with the comb, gather the entire fringe into a single, flat, one-inch section at the very centre of your forehead.

Clamp it between two flat fingers at the bottom of the section, approximately 1cm from the hair tips (use a plastic freezer bag clip instead, if you prefer).

Take the sharpest scissors you own and cut up into the one-inch section of tips, naturally stopping at the fingers. Do not cut across, only upwards. When you’ve snipped the entire inch-wide section, release your fingers and comb through to assess the length, snipping away any single hairs you may have missed.

If it’s still too long (always preferable to too short), repeat the process, nudging fingers up only half a centimetre at a time, before combing through and checking.

How to socialise online – Elle Hunt

Not only is it eminently possible to maintain your friendships under lockdown, talking to people other than those you live and work with is highly advisable if you are to emerge with your sanity intact. Our social lives’ pivot to video just means a bit more planning.

If it’s a large group you are trying to meet with, you can gauge everyone’s availability using the easy web scheduling tool Doodle.

The best platform to use is probably the one the majority of people already have an account with. If everyone is using an iPhone or Apple computer, use FaceTime. WhatsApp permits video calls with up to four participants but, without calling on WhatsApp Web, ties you to your phone.

For many, Skype is a tried and trusted classic that supports up to 50 participants – though rarely seamlessly. Otherwise, most people have a Google account, making Hangouts a straightforward choice.

The video conferencing platform Zoom, which has seen its shares spike since the coronavirus outbreak, limits free group calls to 40 minutes – but you can always call back.

No matter the platform , some lagging audio and frozen faces are inevitable, especially for large groups. Adding some structure – such as a book club, quiz or a table-top role-playing game such as Dungeons & Dragons can be helpful in adjusting to an unfamiliar medium and minimising people talking over each other.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Houseparty app – a conversation with eight people. Photograph: houseparty

The Houseparty app might be geared more towards younger groups, having been a fad among kids a few years ago. But now it seems to be a royal platform of choice. “It’s amazing, I just press a button and all my family pop up,” the Duchess of Cornwall reportedly told a friend. The app can alert you when your friends are online, allowing you to effectively drop in on them. It also has in-built games, for up to eight players at a time.

Some people have ramped up, or perhaps rediscovered, their love of gaming as a means of socialising at a distance, with popular games such as Minecraft, Fortnite and Call of Duty all allowing some in-play communication. It is also possible to play board games online, such as at Board Game Arena and – for the more hardcore – Tabletop Simulator.

For a more relaxed interaction – and one that does not demand that you broadcast your face – Netflix Party is a Google Chrome extension that permits you to sync your streaming with friends, like a remote movie night.

How to work from home – Elle Hunt

Every longtime freelancer knows the secret to effective working from home: put your shoes on. It’s really effective in cueing the mindset shift from “home is where the couch is” to “productivity ninja”.

The goal is to create a distinction, even one that is mostly symbolic, between work mode and home mode, – especially now that you cannot go anywhere else. Setting up a home office, if only a dedicated corner of your kitchen table, that you can arrive at and leave at the day’s end will help (do make sure you leave).

Your new colleagues may also take some adjusting-to. Novelist Julie Cohen shared on Twitter her top tip for working around family, care of her marriage counsellor: a literal work hat. “Train everyone (and yourself) that when you’re wearing The Work Hat, they should leave you alone. (And when you’re wearing it, you should only work),” she tweeted. It will be a talking point on all those video-conferencing calls, too.

Be aware that whatever is visible behind you on your webcam will be under close scrutiny from your colleagues, and inform their judgments of your home, taste and private life. Style accordingly.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Can you recreate the coffee-shop ambience when working at home? The secret may be in the soundtrack. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Those more used to finding their focus in the informal-formality of a cafe or library are now seeking to replicate the effect at home. Gretchen McCulloch, linguist and author of Because The Internet, tweeted that her current strategy was “mellow cafe songs playlist … With coffee and sitting in a different part of my apartment than usual,” recommending an additional background of an eight-hour YouTube stream of Magical Tearoom ASMR Ambience. With the sound of teaspoons tinkling on saucers and hissing espresso machines over gentle indie music, you won’t believe it’s not Starbucks.

You can even fudge together your own overly sweet frappuccino concoction. On the video platform Tik Tok, enterprising teenagers have been filming themselves making “dalgona” coffee to replicate cafe coffee at home. It is easy to make, if high in caffeine and wasteful of milk: mix equal parts instant coffee, boiling water and sugar – about two tbsp per person – and whisk. Add more sugar to taste. Once the mixture is stiff and glossy, pour over milk and ice, stir and serve. And whisk it by hand, even if you have an electric maker. It takes ages; the morning will fly by.

How to keep fit in your home – Zoe Williams

There is no shortage of material online about how to stay fit at home – if anything, the proliferation is the problem. Choice is deadly to motivation, so start by trying to whittle down your options.

What do you want to do each day, and how long do you want to do it for? 15 minutes is reasonable, 30 shows a bit more backbone. It’s more habit-forming to do some every day than an hour twice a week.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Joe Wicks, a phenomenally popular YouTube fitness coach, shows you how to keep fit at home. Photograph: The Body Coach via Getty Images

There are whole-week programmes, such as the book Be Para Fit, or Canadian Air Force Exercises, available on YouTube, that build in your rest days. You can also follow a particular person; Joe Wicks is the obvious one, Adrienne for yoga, and they’ll do a daily workout which will make your decisions for you.

If you’re of a more independent bent, do a timetable more like a classic cardio/resistance workout for two days, yoga on the third day, cardio/resistance the fourth, something fun like a dance routine on the fifth, resistance on its own for the sixth, yoga on the seventh.

If you used to do regular classes, check to see if they’ve gone online; a live-streamed pilates class, at a fixed time, is much more conducive to discipline than roaming freely round WikiHow, trying to find some illustrations that look a bit like your instructor. If you already have some equipment in the house – resistance bands, a skipping rope, a mat, a multi-function Fitt Cube – you can build your own workouts around those. I would really recommend buying a mat, which you’ll need for all floor work.

Find the online instructor who irritates you least: over time, it’ll be a love-hate pendulum, but if you find their voice grating at the start, that’s never going to work. If you’re feeling nostalgic, almost all the classic workouts – Cindy Crawford, Mr Motivator, Rosemary Conley – are on YouTube.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Derrick Evans, aka Mr Motivator. Photograph: Sam Stephenson/Alamy Stock Photo

If you find all people basically annoying, there are some brilliant illustrated resources like DAREBEE Workouts. If you find it hard to watch and move at the same time, choose one workout and repeat it: after a week, you’ll be doing it from memory, which is good for morale. Swap it over after a fortnight, though, as there’s evidence that you build fitness faster when you do things you’re inept at.

Just because there’s no professional asking you whether you have any injuries does not mean you can ignore your injuries. Look up first what to avoid with an gammy knee or similar, rather than typing “routines for one rubbish knee” into Google.

The single most important thing is: don’t wait until you feel like it – wait long enough, and you’ll never feel like it. In the words of the prophet Joe Wicks, the bit where you feel good is at the end of the workout, not the beginning.