Recently I've been doing a bit of work from home and over the last few days my eyes have been quite tired at the end of each day, and getting particularly bad as night time descended.

Here's what my work area looks like - desktop on the left (games anyone?) and the laptop on the right, where all my work gets done.  There's a window to my right and the usual clutter that ends up on desks.

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What I realised was that while I was working on the laptop I was looking into the darkest corner of the room.  When you have a bright light source (the laptop screen) surrounded by a dark area you have a high contrast lighting environment and are much more susceptible to eye strain. This is what was happening.

The solution? Simple, get a small desk lamp and aim it toward the wall.  As you can see in the image below, a little bit of light spills onto the laptop as well as into the corner, keeping the lighting for both the laptop and the corner behind at about the same level.  Now my eyes feel much more rested at the end of each day.  I probably need better lighting in the room overall, but I don't really feel like rewiring my ceiling at the moment :-)

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There are, of course, many other ways to help reduce eye strain such as taking breaks, looking at distant objects (to get your eyes to change focal lengths), avoiding glare either from reflections or bright external light sources, keeping rested, increasing the font size on your screen, working in the native resolution of your monitor (more for LCD's than CRT's), increasing the humidity in your environment (so your eyes don't dry out as quickly) and many more.