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I've grown more and more fond of multi-purpose flies the older
and lazier I've become during my retirement--that is, patterns
and/or methods of tying which produce, in a single fly, reasonable
representations of several mayflies at several stages of their cycles.
Two methods of tying have worked particularly well for me in
this regard.

1. Jason Borger (Gary's son, and, yes, that remarkable caster
in The Movie) has developed an emerger style whose essential
difference is in the hackling and post. Use a post of antron if
you don't care if the fly sinks a bit or of poly if you want it on
top (I prefer dun gray or light yellow). Tie it in a little long,
because the trick to tying the fly is to pull the post over the sparse
hackle wrapped around it (I like brown-dyed grizzly hackle or,
for Callibaetis, regular gray grizzly) and to tie off and clip the post
so that it has a slight upward tilt over the eye of the hook. This fly,
in the brownish version, can serve as a spinner, as a Mahogany
Dun, or as a PMD emerger.

2. Go to p. 399 of the Leeson-Schollmeyer Benchside
Reference and check out Tomas Olsson's method for tying a
parachute hackle fly, which "uses hackle wrapped around a poly
yarn post that is subsequently trimmed and melted, producing
a small button that prevents the hackle from sliding upward."
You'll need to fashion an easily made tool: a heat shield made
from sheet brass.

Flies using either of these methods--with various tailing, shuck,
body, and hackle materials--are durable as well as adaptable
and very easy to tie. In smaller sizes, the tying thread itself will
serve as body material, although quill bodies do a better job of
tripping my, not necessarily the trout's, trigger.