First, if you didn’t know, your RRC Polytech email address is an Outlook email address.

Second, Outlook consists of the email side, but also the calendar side. And that my friends, is the key to this blog post. We’re going to explore some strategies you can use within Outlook to offload some of the mental energy Outlook can consume!

Calendar Events for Due Dates

At the beginning of the term, we’d recommend taking a moment to input due dates into your calendar. You can do this manually, or if your class due dates are in LEARN, you can import them over to Outlook.
How to Download and Sync Your LEARN Calendars : RRC Polytech: Student Accessibility Services

Why? Adding assignment deadlines to your calendar creates a visual timeline of your workload. Seeing due dates laid out helps prevent surprises, supports better planning, and reduces the stress of constantly wondering, “what’s next?”.

Reminders/Alerts

With those due dates, add reminders or alerts! Not just for “hey this is due now”, but set that reminder a week or so out to give yourself time to work on that task. Of course, the exact length in advance you set that reminder or alert is up to you.

• Start with the deadline – when is it due?
• Add reminders for steps/tasks related to that due date – e.g. “start researching”, “complete a draft”, “final read over”, etc…

Categorize for Organization

Consider color coding tasks or calendar items by each course (term, level, etc…), or add in the course code. This helps give you a quick reminder of what course that task is a part of. Less time decoding = less mental effort spent organizing and more energy for completing work!

Consistency & Central Location

Keep your schedule and tasks in the same place! Don’t put yourself in the position where you need to think “where did I write that down”, or spend time searching in multiple locations.

Side Quest: do you use a Google or Apple calendar to organize your personal life as well? Consider merging your personal and school calendars. Within the same blog post linked above, there are instructions on how to do this.
How to Download and Sync Your LEARN Calendars : RRC Polytech: Student Accessibility Services

AI Usage Acknowledgement

This post was jointly written by Copilot and a human.