0) Yes, an evenly lit workspace is essential for any work.<p>0.1) Buy more lamps -- nothing fancy, ideally second hand, <i>always</i> with the common affordable household light socket.
By the time you have the lighting arranged how you want, you may have too many lamps. At that point you can use your army of lamps to inform bigger (& more permanent) spending decisions.<p>1) If you have a regular occurrence of eyestrain or itchy or sore eyes -- particularly if you don't already wear glasses and don't think you're just spending too much time working (not sleeping) -- <i>go to an optometrist</i> and get your eyes/vision checked. Your eye muscles "expect" your eyes to be within spec and will work harder and harder to focus even if your eyes are wobbly and largely unfocusable like mine.<p>2) If your monitor's backlight flickers at a low enough frequency[0] that it's a problem -- get a new monitor[1]. If you spend enough time using your monitor that the eyestrain is real, upgrading your monitor is a no-brainer.<p>2.1) Spend time calibrating and adjusting your display/s, whatever it is.<p>3) Pay attention to how text is being rendered, be picky about it and change settings and fonts. Using all the anti-aliasing and hinting features is not always better.<p>3.1) Prefer light backgrounds with dark text. Your eyes have an easier time focusing with this configuration. If a light background is too bright to look at, you need to add light to the room. Understand that I put this point last because <i>it is less significant than the others</i>.<p>[0] flicker, PWM: would love to see some research on that, by the way. Does the switching frequency matter? (it certainly does for my hearing)<p>[1] FWIW, my general recommendation for serious, but not too serious, quality-cost sweet spot monitors is: IPS, 2560x1440, 27", high refresh rate (i.e. ~120 Hz) -- this comes with some risk of gamer-knife gun mount greeblies, of course.