"The alarm sounds and you're off: Onto checking emails, finding car keys and, if you're lucky, brushing your hair.

The madness, the rush of it all -- it's got to stop. Adding intention into your morning routine is in your best interest: It sets the tone for the rest of your day, and may ultimately reflect how productive, happy and calm you'll be for your following waking hours.

You have the power to wake up on the right side of the bed every single morning for the rest of your life.

"If the first thing you do in the morning isn’t 100 percent for you, selfishly, then the rest of your day will be spent not doing anything for you," writes Micah Baldwin, founder and CEO of Graphicly. "Find something that is yours, and yours alone," Baldwin advises. He personally sets two alarms separated by 30 minutes and gets out of bed at the sound of the second. The ritual has him appreciating sleep.

Take a cue from Baldwin. There are several things you can do, without leaving your bed, that'll ensure a fantastic day ahead. So before you roll out of the comfort of your warm, cozy nest, consider these eight rituals below."

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One of the hardest parts of starting your business or freelancing is trying to figure out what you should charge. Years ago after accepting pennies on the dollar for work, I decided I wanted to get really serious about freelancing. I wanted to dive in headfirst and never look back. But I didn’t know what to charge.

So, I did what any real professional would do and I Google’d it. There were countless blogs and articles that attempted to break pricing down and give me a good idea about what I should charge. It was all too much for me to process until I just decided to charge what I felt was good and increase steadily each month.

Pricing is a tough area for some of us, especially those of us who are passionate about the work. Many of us wouldn’t mind doing work for free just because we like it so much, but then, that’s irresponsible. So again, we’re left with the age old question, “What should I charge”?

YourRate.co

That’s where YourRate.co comes in. It’s a no-nonsense calculator that tells you how much you should charge. They ask 3 simple questions: how much do you want to make per month? How many hours a week do you want to work? And how many weeks do you want off a year? After inputting the info, you’ll get a figure that gives you your hourly rate.

The key to YourRate’s approach? It’s not about what the market will bare, it’s about what you’re worth.

Pro: It’s simple. It was created solely to figure out how much a freelancer should make an hour.

Cons: It doesn’t include expenses. And this is really minor, but be aware that you want to factor that type of thing into your desired income per month. It’s no biggie to include on your own, but it’s definitely something you’ll want to think about. However, the calculator does double your rate for some expenses such as taxes.

Here’s a picture of my ideals. I’m dreaming, but obviously you need to make sure these are figures you’re comfortable with and go from there. You also may want to see how this fits for you if you don’t do hourly and only do flat rates (like myself). The idea of this website is obviously to get you to value yourself more and charge more for what you desire. It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of charging what ‘the guy down the street’ charges; you’re not the guy down the street, if you’re not meeting your goals what are you doing?

Are you undercharging? How do you calculate your rate? Let us know in the comments.

Featured image/thumbnail, money image via Shutterstock.

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If you haven’t figured out Obamacare yet… join the club.

There’s a lot we need to learn about our new health care system.

But there is SOMETHING we all do know… Obamacare offers Universal Healthcare, RIGHT?

Er…wrong.

Not for the estimated 11.7 million undocumented workers in the US.   And this could be a big problem for all of us.

When these illegal immigrants have health issues they make expensive visits to hospital emergency rooms where average costs for common illness can be staggering.

So… who’s going to pay their bills? Well, taxpayer money has been subsidizing emergency care for undocumented workers for a while.

There’s a government program the Washington Post calls “emergency Medicaid.” Hospitals are reimbursed for treating Medicaid defined low-income illegal immigrants in the ER (only life or death situations and pregnancy care are covered).

Here lies the rub… one of Obamacare’s key benefits was to decrease the cost of national healthcare. 

The hope was newly insured Americans would avoid the expensive ER as they receive increased access to primary care physicians (healthcare term for your everyday ‘doc). 

But with so many undocumented workers in the system, health costs for the country could remain stubbornly high.

Would it be cheaper just to let illegal immigrants pay have health insurance like everybody else? 

Maybe… but this gets into the messy politics of immigration reform that is currently bottled up in dysfunctional Washington.

So… have we made Obamacare any clearer for you?

Have you ever quit a job?

In this tight economy most of us are holding onto what we can get… even if we are feeling exploited by our bosses.

              Not Marina Shifrin.

She had enough with her job but did not write a “letter of resignation”…

She told her former employer about her departure via this interpretive dance—for the whole world to see.

               And of course, most companies would accept a simple letter and let it at that. Her employer, Next Media Animation, based in Taiwan, took things a little further than that.

               Regardless of how the relationship ended, both parties seem to now be moving on just handsomely. Ms. Shifrin has a potential new gig with Queen Latifah’s talk show, while NMA now has a creative new hiring tool.

               And of course, both sides elicited laughs and cheers.

               Sure, there’s something to be said for traditional professionalism when it comes to resigning from a job. But maybe jazzing it up isn’t a bad option either.

We’re really excited to announce our latest Treehouse project, Using PHP with MySQL. We hope you enjoy it!

In this project, we’ll extend the Shirts 4 Mike project that we developed in Build a Simple PHP Application and Enhancing a Simple PHP Application to use the popular database system, MySQL. We’ll use a MySQL database to store information for the shirts on our site. We’ll query the database using PHP and talk about the ways you can mitigate security risks such as SQL injection.

Start Using PHP with MySQL

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