Navigating Work Life Balance as a WordPress Developer

Scott: Oh, I’m doing great. How about you?

BobWP: Doing good. I’m looking forward to this because it’s kind of a two part thing. Well, it’s one part really, but it goes into two parts. Before we even get into what we’re going to be talking about, why don’t you introduce yourself to the listeners, kind of tell us a little bit what you do.

Scott: I am Scott Kingsley Clark. I am the development manager over at Paid Memberships Pro. You may also know me from the Pods Framework, which is a pretty cool plugin for WordPress. And I’ve done WordPress work with WooCommerce for the past eight or nine years or so. Just depends on exactly when I was switching over from Magento on some projects.

Scott’s Roundtable at WordFest

BobWP: It’s a little bit of history there. What we’re going to talk about is building your business and profits and growing this and marketing and all that good stuff and development, but it goes much deeper than that. Scott is doing a session at WordFest. This is an online conference that’s yearly, WordFest live. Very interesting conference because it’s more than just about development. It’s more just about running business and the nitty gritty. And Scott’s going to be talking more about that at the end. First tell us what your session is going to be at WordFest.

Scott: We’re talking about a very interesting section of the work in WordPress, open source work. This is plugins that are released, themes that released, things that are, used on people’s websites, to be able to do the work that they do or sell the products that they sell. It’s the projects behind those. They’re usually, depending on the size, they may be small, but maybe big, they’re usually facing the challenge of how do they deal with the work life balance with their open source work, whether not that’s just their side project or maybe it’s their full-time job. How do you balance that and what sort of challenges have we all faced? I joked with John, one of the people on the round table, for this session and, that’s JJJ, and I was saying, “This is kind of like a therapy session,” because we’re all talking about all the challenges we’ve been having over the past number of years that we all share. And it’s just good to validate that with other people to say, “Hey, you’re not the only one.”

Balancing work and life as a Woo builder

BobWP: Let’s focus just a little bit on WooCommerce and the reason being, you brought up an interesting point when we were chatting pre-show, is that building for WooCommerce is, obviously, a little bit different than just building a brochure site in WordPress. That work life balance brings a lot of different challenges along the way, because you’re basically building sites for people’s livelihoods. A lot of times they can be very stressed about that and their lives and work balance might leak into yours. Just give us some thoughts and insights you have on that particular part of it.

Scott: With the work that I do with Pods, for instance, it’s not WooCommerce focused. A lot of the people that come to me for support and come with me with challenges and gripes and whatever happened wrong, those just are at a different level than the work I do with Paid Memberships Pro or with WooCommerce, extensions and products, themes, plugins, all that. When you get to the things that you charge for, that’s a whole thing, like selling a premium product. People depend on that for their site and they expect a certain level of care and effort in that product. But when making money with your solution, if it’s an extension for WooCommerce or what’s the work we do at Paid Memberships Pro, the money factor is a big deal because now you’re talking about someone’s site going down. Or maybe not the site itself going down, maybe it’s just the checkout page, or just this one page for customers that are going through this one flow. All sorts of weird issues that you find that don’t seem big to you, but actually at scale can matter extensively.

Those things, when you’re talking about millions of dollars a day, or maybe 50 bucks a day, this all matters to the person running their business. This is their money. This is the money they’re depending on to grow, to survive, to put money on the table for their family. This matters a lot. When something goes wrong, you can believe how intense those conversations can get, coming from them saying, “Hey, there’s a big problem here. You need to stop everything you’re doing work on this and focus on my issue here.” And you can do as much as you can to try to appease those situations, but there’s going to be people coming around that will definitely be completely irate and very hard to manage.

That is one of the big challenges is you get one of those messages and you’re eating dinner yourself and you’re done with work for the day. Here comes this message and there goes your night. It’s trying to figure out how do you balance these sort of things that really becomes the challenge.

Recognizing the need for an extra balance when building with Woo

BobWP: Do you think that developers that are moving into WooCommerce, especially those that have been doing, maybe, more basic sites, but they’re doing sites that don’t have that intensity level of need; do you think that most of them are even aware of that entering it? Or do you think they learn it real quick? What is your words of wisdom right now for anyone that’s, “Okay, I’m doing site for my clients. They’re really cool. I’m doing one for this person over here that it’s a brochure site for a pet sitter and I’m doing this for this little retail shop.” They just want a storefront type of thing, not selling anything. Now everybody wants to sell online. How do you prepare them for that work balance?

Scott: If you’re encountering it as someone who’s just now starting out in WooCommerce space and trying to add some really cool features to WooCommerce and to shop sites and such, if you’ve dealt with stuff before, you may already have the problem, you just didn’t realize you had it. Once you get into this kind of market, there’s a different kind of customer, different kind of person on WordPress.org, if it’s a WordPress.org plugin, that will start to appear. And it’s like a Pokemon game. You’re walking around, going through the bushes and cutting stuff down, and you encounter these crazy level Pokemon all of a sudden, because you’ve gone to a whole new area. This is that kind of situation where you’re going to find yourself in those communication challenges with these people. And you have to decide how best to limit how you deal with them and when you deal with them.

Some people find it easier to deal with those challenges in the morning, get it over with. “I’m not going to reply to that. That was after 5:00 PM. You know what, let it be in the morning because I cannot deal with this. I don’t want to crush my night.” Or in some cases they’ll do with it right away. And it just depends on the person and how well they have their life structured. I know John had discussed how he tends to just try to do what he can whenever he can. And I know that’s not really for the faint of heart. I know he also admits it’s a challenge for him. He’s trying to find better ways to pull back and say, “No, I don’t need to work on this.”

When it comes to jumping into a WooCommerce product and you’re trying to offer something, maybe the biggest thing I can suggest as a tip is just try to, as you go through your week, write down your challenges and revisit them. Be able to say, “Okay, you know what? I had a lot of these weird customers or weird circumstances where they were asking me these things at night. What should I do? What should I set as my boundary?” Setting boundaries for yourself can be very important in maintaining that work life balance because the work life balance, especially if you’re working from home, can be so hazy and blurry. “I’m working here and now I’m working on other things.” And setting a boundary for yourself and feeling confident that boundary is what is right for you and your family and the people you’re around. I think that’s important.

BobWP: That’s interesting because I know, and not to divert the conversation any, but my wife and I have been basically working for ourselves and out of our home for probably three decades. And I think of that, what you just said, and we’ve learned our pace. And some people might say, “Bob, why do you work on the weekends?” I’ve been doing this a long time and it works for me, how I balance everything. I have certain limitations. I know when I end the day and what I’ll do after that. I’m not doing client work anymore. That’s a big difference too, because I’ve been there and done that. That’s good advice.

Top tip for the balance

Before we get into a little bit more details about WordFest, without giving away all the goodness of your session, how about choosing one or two general work balance tips for people in the WordPress space, these product builders, something just to give them a little bit of an edge. Then it’ll also give them a teaser for what good stuff is going to be coming this Friday.

Scott: The round table is with Aurooba Ahmed, and Luca Tumino and John James Jacoby. And of course me. This is my first round table. I’ve never really done this before. We recorded it two or three times because there was just a series of super, terribly, bad, timed, circumstances, which messed every single one of them up. By the third time it was easy.

Each of them had totally different work styles. And so this, it’s almost cheating to an answer, but Luca is Italian and, wow, he has probably the coolest one. His tip is “Do all your work in a different language.” So all of his coding is in English. All of his work is in English. Then he’s done for the day and he speaks Italian. Actually, he went so far to say that all of his work on the computer is English. So when he steps away from his computer, he’s done, his mind switches. And for some reason, in his mind, when he switches, it to Italian, people who are multilingual know this, that your brain changes how it works because you’re now speaking in a different language and you’re almost a different person in some ways.

BobWP: Oh, wow. I never thought of that. That’s fascinating actually. That tip alone is worth it.

Scott: Go learn another language.

BobWP: Unfortunately I know one language and I’m stuck in that, so I’m just spinning my wheels. Before we go, tell us a little bit more details about WordFest and when your session is and all that good stuff. And we’ll revisit the date coming up here real soon.

Don’t miss WordFest March 4th

Scott: WordFest is powered by Big Orange Heart, which is a really awesome organization, very much believing in everything, trying to make people in WordPress grow through all sorts of different initiatives. And it works for me because that’s very much the type of person I am. I’m wearing a GIVE shirt, by the way. People can’t see it but it’s that same kind of ethos. And WordFest is a 24 hour online event. It is free and you can donate. It’s celebrating everything WordPress. It’s very inclusive. It has over 60 sessions and there is a lot of really awesome experts and speakers. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to catch them all live, but it’s going to be one of those challenges for me. It’s this Friday, March 4th. I think I saw 3,500 attendees. That’s a large amount.

BobWP: That is cool.

Scott: And they’re even going to try to run another one in September. I think there’s room for it.

BobWP: Excellent. I know I’ll definitely be there as much as I can. I’m really looking forward to it. Everybody, do check that out. If you forget about it, check the show notes and I’ll have all the information, the links there and links to Scott’s and the rest of his panel, their discussion or session, I should say. Before we go, where can people connect with you directly, Scott?

Scott: You can find me at scottkclark.com or on Twitter, it’s @scottkclark.

BobWP: Excellent. Well, thank you very much, Scott. Enjoyed this and we’ll have you back for a longer discussion. We’ll really get into some Woo step up. For right now, we got to do that balance in life and some good tips there and looking forward to hearing your session. So thanks again.

Scott: No problem. So glad to have been a part of this session and thank you for, especially, for giving WordFest such a nice shout out here. This is worthwhile. I hope everyone can find time to enjoy it.