Interview with Andriy, a Wordpress developer & consultant

So I've been working as a web developer since July of 2014.

After three years, I've decided to change things because I wanted to have more control over my time and income.

So in July of 2017, I've decided to change things up, and that's how I left my job and started my own journey.

These days, I'm primarily focusing on helping people build membership and e-learning websites using WordPress.

I feel like this is a big industry these days, and there are a lot of people who need help with these kinds of projects.

I usually wake up at around 6 am, do some exercising, and a bit of stretching and start my work at about 7-8 am.

After that, I typically work for about 4-6 hours before I take a break from work.

This is the time period where I do the bulk of my work.

But I also spend an hour or two in the evening mostly chatting with my clients because many of them live in the US.

I'm a boring person in that sense I guess because I typically work from my room at my home :)

I honestly don't work from coffee shops and things like that because I don't like to spend time commuting there.

Plus places like that can be noisy.

That's why I prefer my home.

I'm a bit old-school in that sense, so I don't use many online apps or things like that.

I do use things like Slack for communication, but for productivity and planning, I use my whiteboard that's hanging on a wall in my room.

I love writing things out, planning work, and planning my day on a whiteboard.

I typically write 4-6 things that I want to accomplish every day on a whiteboard, and I use timeboxing for every task to make sure that the task doesn't take too long to accomplish.

That can be a challenge sometimes, especially if the task is boring.

But the biggest thing that helps me is to stay off my phone and social media.

That helps me focus a lot.

If the task is a big one, I usually break it down into smaller tasks and do them one by one.

This doesn't apply to remote work, but rather freelancing (which are different sometimes) is that I have the freedom to schedule my own day and the fact that I don't get paid per hour of time, but rather per task/project.

So if I complete the job faster, I get paid the same amount as I would if it took me longer.

This obviously has a disadvantage, because sometimes you have to work longer than you estimated and you aren't getting paid for that.

But I still prefer this to hourly billing.

I think the biggest thing that I don't like is that communication with people on your team is much harder than when you're at the office.

For me personally, it's not that big of an issue because I typically work on projects alone, but I have been working on bigger projects with multiple team members, and it has been much more difficult to communicate with them.

Even though there are many apps like Slack or Skype that help with this process, I feel like face to face communication is still much better and easier.

That's a good question.

These days I'm better at picking my clients than I was back a few years ago.

The most important thing to the client and me is for him/her to be open-minded and willing to take advice and being committed.

Also, if they have a budget is great.

And even if they can't afford me, but they're committed, I still try to help them by either offering advice referring them to other freelancers.

So that's how I qualify my clients these days.