Helen, my Optical assistant is off today partying at a wedding so I have had a non-testing day catching up with the mountain of paperwork I have been putting off all summer. As a result I am left with the dull frontal headache and scratchy eyes all my regular VDU using patients complain of. I don't know how they do it day in, day out.
Needless to say, I haven't been following my own advice which is to follow the 20:20:20 rule
i.e every 20 minutes take a break and spend 20 seconds looking at a distance of 20 feet.
The idea behind this is to relax the eyes and give them a break from looking at one distance for long periods. My screen position is also lousy, with the screen well below my eye line leading to a stiff neck and the dull headache.
A bit of googling has lead me to the workrave app which can be installed on your pc and reminds you to take regular "microbreaks" and longer breaks periodically. I'll try it tomorrow and let you know the results.
As a follow up to this, I have been trying the workrave app and it does act as a reminder to take breaks. The default is set to every 10 mins which is a bit of a pain but the settings are easy to adjust to 20 secs every 20 mins or whatever suits you best.
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