Screen time was wrecking my eyes until I did this
TL;DR: Staring at a screen was wrecking my eyes, but I solved it with these two solutions.
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Disclaimer: I’m not a health expert, and make sure that you take the correct intervals that are best for you.
During my time in college and my first software job, I experienced the silent productivity killer. Eye strain. I would spend all day working on assignments or work projects at my laptop, staring into the deep blue screen, and at the end of the day, my eyes would be burning. Hard to explain unless you've experienced it. Here’s a quick list of eye strain symptoms:
- Sore, tired, burning, or itching eyes
- Watery or dry eyes, blurred or double vision
- Headache, difficulty concentrating
- Increased sensitivity to light, called photophobia
Most of the symptoms listed I had personally experienced, and most digital natives have when staring at a screen. I’ll show you what I did to solve this problem by changing the redshift on my screen and also downloading an app for the 20–20–20 rule.
(1) Changing the redshift filter on your laptop
The first thing I did was research ways to help mitigate eye strain, and one of the first things I found was that changing the red light filter on my desktop helped reduce eye strain.
Blue light is at a higher frequency (high energy) and will wear your eyes out faster than red light, which is at a lower frequency (lowest energy). Manually turning on the night light on Windows or macOS will drastically reduce your eye strain when spending longer periods in front of a screen.
(2) The 20–20–20 rule
The second suggestion I have is to try the 20–20–20 rule. Every 20 minutes, look away 20 feet, for 20 seconds. There’s a lot of data on the benefits of the 20–20–20 rule that I linked below. However, one thing that I found pretty quickly was that there were no apps that allowed me to set up a timer directly for this use case.
That’s when I had the idea to design Periodic Pro. As a user, you only need to set up a single periodic timer through the app with a start and stop time, and then what days the timer needs to be active. It will also send push notifications to your device when the timer goes off.
The app supports Active and Interval timers. An Active timer has a start and end notification. So, for example, I set my timer to go off every 20 minutes, and then send me a push notification at the start of the 20 seconds, then end of the 20 seconds. For the Interval timer, I have a reminder to drink water every 30 minutes during normal work hours. The other nice feature, as well, is that you can pause the timer if you need it to stop or take a rest.
Conclusiuon
The red light filter was the first approach I took; it's free and is super simple to set up. Red light will be easier on your eyes, and this is a quick fix. For a long-term fix, I would recommend Periodic Pro as it allows you to set reminders for when to take breaks and rest your eyes using custom timers.
Hope this blog post was insightful and that your eyes get some much-needed rest — Have a blessed day ❤️
