Why subscribe to Taming the Trunk?

Of course, the number one reason for subscribing to Taming the Trunk is to see Ai generated elephants doing unusual things.

Here’s five other reasons:

• It’s free!

• You’ll get a weekly Evernote newsletter full of news, gossip and tips.

• Access to free subscriber only Evernote & Bending Spoons chat on Substack.

• The occasional free template.

I’m Jon. I’ve been using Evernote since 2008ish and I’m an Evernote Certified Expert.

Evernote is the first app I open in the morning and the last one I close at night.

My first career was working in radio and TV, I spent 17 years interviewing famous and not so famous folk.

My day job is now consulting and training in email marketing, Mailchimp, marketing automation and podcasting.

What a come down eh, one minute you’re schmoozing with not very famous folk and the next you’re trying to figure out where Mailchimp have moved the send button to.

Because of the radio connection I also run private podcasting training sessions for businesses.

Work, podcasts, client projects and personal life are organised inside Evernote, and I don’t use tags!

I don't do a huge amount of social stuff but find me here in the subscriber chat room or on Mastodon.

My Productivity Stack

These are the apps that keep me going. I have way too many subscriptions and I rely on tech far too much. How did we manage before apps!

Evernote

This is my base station. The place where everything goes. All my meeting notes, work documentation, code snippets, receipts, everything goes into Evernote.

I have automations setup in my email software so I can send emails into EN quickly. My CRM and Invoicing software send me notes and reminders.

My number one feature is “Switch To”, this is how I move around Evernote from my keyboard. I also use it as a quick search.

I also have the sidebar closed… all the time!

The home screen is the first thing I look at every morning so I can see my tasks and calendar.

Zoho Mail

I’ve been using Zoho as long as Evernote. Probably started around 2008ish. It lets me have a little more control over email and I use a lot of filters and automations.

Zoho Mail is the most power web-based email you will find, and it doesn’t sell your data. I really mean that. It beats Gmail and Outlook hands down.

It has widgets and one of the connects to Evernote so I can transfer the contents of an email including attachments directly into the notebook I want.

You can also build pretty powerful filters to divert email into Evernote and even write code to create custom filters and actions.

Great app!

Inoreader

RSS feeds are not dead!

Coming from a radio/TV/journalist(ish) background I hate having algorithms decide what I read so I take control myself.

Inoreader costs more than Evernote but it’s well worth it. I subscribe to the news sources, magazines, YouTube channels, Facebook pages I want and have the content delivered to me in one place.

I can create rules to filter content how I want to see it and if a page doesn’t have an RSS feed Inoreader will monitor it for updates.

Great app.

Textexpander

The number of times I have to write “Taming the Trunk” drives me mad so I now do /ttt. It just autocompletes for me.

I also have a whole bunch of email templates setup so I can use them again and again with a simple keyboard shortcut.

I’m also slightly dyslexic and I tend to type of lot of words either totally wrong, backwards or I miss the same letters over and over again. Textexpander spots these recurring mistakes and fixes them on the fly!

But there’s more

On top of these apps, I also use the Zoho One suite of apps, Canva, Vivaldi web browser and a few other applications. All of them help me become a little more efficient, I think.

If I feel an app is starting to hold me back or slow me down, I try and change my workflow or change the app.

Fussing around with software is not my thing!

I’ll update this post as things change. Right now, this is what I’m using!