21 Evernote Templates & Workflows That Skyrocket Your Productivity process.st /evernote-templates/ 5/12/2017
Adam Henshall May 12, 2017
Evernote is rapidly becoming a staple part of our modern workflows. From 2009 to 2010, Evernote jumped from 2 million users to 6 million. Impressive, right? Not compared to its 2017 figures. Evernote now boasts over 200 million users and over 5 billion notes created. Evernote has become a real player in the world of cloud technologies. What started off as a simple note-taking app to help you store your thoughts has become a powerful tool with multiple potential use cases. You can still use Evernote to store your notes, but it is capable of much more than that. The much more is what we’ll be investigating in the course of this article. There are three key areas we’re going to look at: Evernote templates, and how they can expand functionality Evernote automation integrations, and the different platforms you can connect with Evernote workflows, which have been tried and tested to improve your productivity
What are Evernote templates and how do I use them? 1/16
Evernote templates take the basic features and expand on them to provide further value, allowing you to create tables or lists or other structures within the Evernote platform. The basic structure of Evernote is centered around creating Notes which you store in folders called Notepads . You can then use a tagging system to order and organize these notes so that they are easily searchable. At Process Street, we understand the importance of being able to standardize repeatable tasks in order to create a process which can be followed each time the task is delivered. In fact, we have a rule that we should create a process for every task we undertake more than twice. Evernote has also recognized the importance of having systems in place for regularly occurring tasks and processes, and this is what spurred their attempts to make templates a readily available part of their service:
Templates can provide inspiration by showing what’s possible in Evernote, and can help you streamline processes you repeat often. The beauty of templates is that they allow you to use your powerful brain and precious time for things other than set-up and formatting.
A simple example of a template to use could be a calendar template. Or a to-do list. Or a meeting agenda. Or an expenses sheet. These Evernote templates are very useful for simple repeatable tasks. Though they don’t have the depth and power which Process Street templates have, they can prove very actionable in certain scenarios. If you’re in a team which employs Evernote, then a meeting agenda template would help you take notes and store them so that they could easily be accessed by all. We care about improving your workflows and we think these templates could give you a helping hand. If you want to make use of any of the templates we link you to, simply click on the template to open and preview, then click Save to Evernote.
13 Evernote templates to improve your workflows Boost your marketing with these templates Marketing Asset Library
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We all spend a lot of time and effort making sure that the branding of our company is on point. However, we don’t always have an effective space to store all our relevant assets. You could use Google Drive or OneDrive, or even Process Street, but for you Evernote-heads out there we have this template. This lets you upload the different elements you would need for your marketing to Evernote , including different logo sizes, your different font options, your color codes, and any taglines or team details. Click here to get the Marketing Asset Library template.
Marketing Calendar
There’s no way you’re going to build a marketing calendar like ours in Evernote. It’s impossible. We have our content calendar in Airtable, but we pump out a lot of content and perform a lot of different marketing tasks. For a smaller company with a lighter marketing touch, the simplicity of the Evernote solution could help.
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You can see the grid and columns in the template. These make a bit of a change to the normal UX you associate with Evernote, but they provide that stripped down spreadsheet experience very well. Click here to get the Marketing Calendar template.
Marketing Persona
Determining who constitutes your target persona is never an easy task. Nevertheless, it is a crucial business task which you cannot afford to ignore. This template won’t necessarily help you in formulating your audience and defining your target persona, but it will help you greatly in communicating that information once you have it . You can use this template to store your description of your core customer so that it can be easily found in future for reference if needed. Click here to get the Marketing Persona template.
Marketing Plan
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I hope you enjoyed those short and simple templates. The easy ride is over. This ain’t your mama’s template now, sunshine. If you click on the Marketing Plan template, you’ll see that there’s a lot of scrolling necessary before you can reach the instructions at the bottom. This template contains multiple sections : 1. Overview 2. Timeline 3. Research 4. SWOT Analysis 5. Goals & Objectives 6. Buyer Personas 7. Calendar 8. Evaluations 9. Sign-Offs. This kind of template demonstrates why Evernote has begun to see itself not just as a competitor to apps like Google Keep, but even the mighty Microsoft Word. With its simple UX and accessible cloud storage, a complex document like this one can perform equally well in Evernote as it might within a traditional word processing platform. Click here to get the Marketing Plan template.
Blog Post Template
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As you may have guessed by now, I write articles. Blog posts, specifically. As such, here’s a template to assist you in your blog writing if you ever fancy giving it a try. This template contains not just the space to write content, but also all the necessary additions to make sure content has been reviewed and critiqued. It includes a checklist for the writing process , areas to upload creative assets, and a sign-off section at the bottom to make sure all content has been adequately reviewed. If you’re churning out writing on a small scale with a degree of oversight, then this template may be of real use. Click here to get the Blog Post Template. You can check out our Process Street pre-publish template here too , which we use to make sure each post is perfect before reaching your eyes.
Social Media Calendar Template
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This little template provides another calendar, but this time for managing your social media posts over time. It has a color-coded key at the top to help make things visual and intuitive, You could use this calendar template if you’re looking to roll out a simple social media strategy across your team and need an easy place to store it. Click here to get the Social Media Calendar Template.
Social Media Influencer Profile
Social media marketing is a rapidly changing game. Right now, it appears that one of the hottest approaches to social media marketing is to gain coverage from influencers. This template is designed to help you manage that by keeping profiles on your influencers. It’s short and sweet, but certainly actionable.
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Click here to get the Social Media Influencer Profile template.
Drive your sales up with Evernote’s help Sales Contact Template
This template is intended to be used to track the information relevant to a particular contact, and to track your interactions with them. When you use the template, you should set it for one particular client and store the resulting Note in the appropriate Notepad. Click here to get the Sales Contact Template.
Work Order Template
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When you have lots of projects on your plate, it can be difficult to track all the ongoing work or remember where you stored the details of particular jobs. If you’re an Evernote user, a template like this one could help you out. You can record the details of the contract – agreed due dates and deliverables – along with client information and price breakdowns. It uses a mixture of text fields and grids to help you order your information in easy to parse ways. Click here to get the Work Order Template. Alternatively, you can find a Process Street variant embedded here below :
Meeting Debrief Note
As recommended by the template, you should create a folder for debriefs and save all these notes into that folder.
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This note would then be used straight after a call to record some key snippets of information. It contains 6 sections which you can fill in : 1. Get the picture 2. “We Met” statement 3. Action items 4. Professional challenges 5. Personal interests and passions 6. About/Facts Taking notes directly after a meeting is a good excuse to take a moment of reflection while the events of the meeting are still fresh in your mind. You can use your notes from the meeting to help you assess the 6 items above. The meeting debrief note should leave you with an organized and actionable summary of your call. Click here to get the Meeting Debrief Note template. Or check out our Process Street meeting checklist designed for daily standups within a Scrum methodology:
Client Consulting Session Details
The template, in this case, has been designed to act as a mixture of meeting notes and shared action plans. The way you fill out the template is most similar to taking regular meeting notes – updates, summaries, and action points. The difference with this template is that it recommends that you share the Note, once completed, with the client . The note contains action points for yourself and your client, so you can bring the collaborative potential of Evernote into your business relationships. Click here to get the Client Consulting Session Details template.
Contact Relationship Management 10/16
This template provides another alternative way of storing clients’ details. It gives the user a simple table layout where different bits of information can be stored. It recommends adapting the template further to your needs so that you can add more complex media files as well, such as images, voice recordings, or videos. Click here to get the Contact Relationship Management template.
Incident Response Template
We’re all building our systems for the best case scenario, but we can’t forget to include safety nets for the unfortunate occasions when things go wrong. That’s what this template is here for. If something has gone awry with a client’s project, the first step is to not panic. The second is to document the incident and the third is to understand the incident so that it can be avoided in future. This template contains a few short sharp questions to help guide you in finding out what happened and how it can be prevented in future.
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Click here to get the Incident Response Template.
Make the most of Evernote with workflow automations If you’re a long time follower of the Process Street blog, you’ll know how truly enamored we are with automation and its various potentials. We’re particularly interested in the accessible automations which anyone can implement into their personal or professional workflows. That’s why we’ve included these Zapier zaps which you can employ with Evernote to automate your processes. We’ve included a few different examples to get your juices flowing, but you should jump into Zapier to check out more!
Create new Trello cards from Evernote This is a little automation which you’ll see mentioned in our real life use cases at the end. You can hook up Evernote to automatically shoot a new card onto your Trello board. More than that, if you check out further integrations with Trello you’ll find that you can leave comments on cards directly from Evernote too. Give this one a try to put Evernote in your task management workflow. Create Trello cards from new Evernote notes Use this Zap powered by Zapier
Create Google Calendar events from Evernote Reminders We’ve put some templates above for calendars within Evernote, but sometimes the simple calendar the template provides is not enough to manage your complex and hectic schedule. Have no fear! You can integrate your Google Calendar with Evernote to help manage your daily activities and meetings with ease. Sometimes that’s just an effective way of working. Create Google Calendar events (quick add events) from Evernote reminders Use this Zap powered by Zapier
Backup your Evernote notes to Dropbox If you’re using Evernote for large documents and reports – crucial company information – then it’s a wise idea to keep things backed up. The marketing strategy template included above is a prime example of an Evernote note which would benefit from being stored in multiple places, just in case. You can set Evernote to backup all your notes as they come into Dropbox. You can also connect to Google Drive or OneDrive – whatever takes your fancy. Backup your Evernote notes to Dropbox Use this Zap powered by Zapier
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Get Slack notifications for new Evernote notes If you’re like me, you’re probably big into Slack. I’ve even thought about setting up a Slack for my friends as an alternative to Whatsapp groups. Seriously, I like Slack. For this reason, hooking Evernote up to Slack appeals to me greatly. It could be used for reporting, like when someone tags a new note as #marketing it can show up in #marketing in Slack. Or you could use it for notifications for yourself. Whatever works. Get Slack notifications for new Evernote notes Use this Zap powered by Zapier
Add new starred Gmail email to Evernote As you’ve probably guessed from my love for Slack, email irritates me. It particularly irks me when I receive important emails and star them for yet-to-be-defined-time-in-the-future. I’d much rather set up a notebook in Evernote where these starred emails can live. It just fits my workflow better not to have to keep jumping from place to place, email account to email account, Gmail or otherwise. Add new starred Gmail emails to Evernote Use this Zap powered by Zapier
Save your favorited Tweets to Evernote How useful this will be depends on what area you work in. I’m not a heavy Twitter user, certainly not a member of the Twitterati, but I’ll browse through on a fairly regular basis. As I follow people who generally have interesting things to say, I’ll often want to record or remember some of those interesting things, links, or leaks. Simply favorite the tweet and it’s saved in Evernote for future reference. Save Your Favorited Tweets to Evernote Use this Zap powered by Zapier
Post new Evernote notes to an RSS feed I’ll hold my hands up – I don’t really use RSS feeds. I set up a Feedly not long ago but I haven’t made use of it. Though, I have some plans to test it out with Zapier’s multi-step zaps in future. For those of you who are RSS engaged, this could be a handy addition to your process. Post new Evernote notes to an RSS feed Use this Zap powered by Zapier
Create Evernote notes from Pinterest pins One area of Evernote which we haven’t really expanded on too much in this article is its ability to store media and act as a library. Evernote can be a surprisingly visual tool when given the chance. You can use Evernote to backup
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your pins and even make them shared access amongst your team, all within one platform. Create Evernote notes from Pinterest Pins Use this Zap powered by Zapier
Create new checklists in Process Street from Evernote Last but certainly not least, you can connect Evernote with Process Street! You can create a new note within Evernote and use that to launch a checklist on Process Street. You could use this for yourself, or use it as a means to delegate tasks to others. Considering that Evernote’s templates are useful but lack the depth and power of Process Street, this is an effective way of expanding on the potential of Evernote without having to completely overhaul your workflows. Check this one out and start integrating Process Street now! Create a new checklist in Process Street when you write a note in Evernote Use this Zap powered by Zapier
Tried and tested workflows to inspire your processes Joe Buhlig gets round templates differently
Making templates may be one way of automating the structures for repetitive or regular tasks, but they’re not the only way. Joe Buhlig describes how he uses a shortcut tool to auto-fill his Evernote notes with the structure he wants to use. He uses TextExpander, which we’ve mentioned before when discussing task automation tools. The tool detects what you’re writing and suggests the rest. So, if he starts writing the structure for one of his templates, TextExpander will recommend the rest. He also uses the Zapier alternative IFTTT – it’s applets are pictured above – to automatically save his notes to cloud storage for backup.
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Vladimir Campos uses simple naming to speed his search
One of the benefits cited regularly by users of Evernote is its search function. Evernote consultant, Vladimir Campos, has a couple of tips and tricks which he uses to optimize his searches . One example use case is for his travel related documents. Consultants tend to travel a lot. Campos has set up a rule in his Gmail to send all travel related materials to his default notebook in Evernote, titled Archive. He sets up a system that when he has completed a trip he tags related notes with Done. Which means that trips yet to occur lack the tag Done. When he wants to find materials related to upcoming trips, he can use a particular search string to find them very easily. Like using Google search in Evernote. To find a ticket for an upcoming journey, he would search for:
notebook:Archive ticket -tag:done
This search string defines the notebook to conduct the search within, selects the word to look for “ticket”, and uses the minus sign to remove all results with the tag Done. Pretty cool, Vlad. Pretty cool.
Vinay Patankar delegates and notifies through Evernote tagging Our CEO, Vinay, uses Evernote as part of his workflow to delegate tasks and notify the development team of any issues which crop up. Vinay uses IFTTT on his phone to connect Evernote with both Trello and Jira. When he wants to delegate a task for someone, he creates a note in Evernote and tags it to create a new card on someone’s personal Trello board . The same system is used for Jira. The tag Jira Bug on a note assigns it to Jira as a bug, while the tag Jira Enhancement assigns to Jira as a story. This process shows how Evernote can centralize communication across platforms while storing a record of these events.
Use Evernote as a simple centralization for communication Ultimately, Evernote’s templates won’t compete with Process Street’s checklists for depth of functionality or complexity, but not every task requires that. Whether it involves storing branding information and assets in an easily accessible space or passing on information about key events, Evernote provides a sleek location to manage these needs. If you’re using Evernote as your day to day tool , you need to make sure you’re making the most of it. Take templates and zaps from this article and bring them into your daily operations to improve your workflows and maximize your productivity.
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