DIY Ultimate Note-Taking Notebook: A Follow Up
Sunday, August 22, 2010 by Luke Turcotte 
Our DIY Ultimate Note-Taking Notebook post at Lifehacker.com has received quite a bit of buzz over the past week. After reading through the comments I thought it would be a good exercise to address some of the questions and concerns readers are having.
Cost
When designing the Ultimate Notebook, keeping costs down was a relatively low priority. Premium materials were chosen to create a notebook that would be enjoyable to write on and durable enough to survive a semester of heavy use. As a student, your notebook is a tool of your craft, you shouldn't hesitate to spend a few extra bucks on an item of such high importance.
That being said, I believe many readers are overestimating the cost to make an Ultimate Notebook. The paper chosen is expensive at $20 dollars for a ream (500 sheets). With a full ream you can make five 100 page notebooks, $4 each. The paper perforator is a machine which you can use for the length of your college career to make notebooks. Although it’s a small investment up front, $45 on a tool used for several notebooks each semester is well worth it. To put it in perspective, that’s one night of drinking at a bar. Your other option is to have Staples perforate the pages for you at $0.20 a sheet. Finally, binding with nice plastic covers and coil binding will cost $7. Ink cost will factor in as well, but this will vary from printer to printer (Hint: take advantage of the office photocopier in the last few days of your summer internship). All in all you’re looking at a price per notebook of approximately $11, a small price considering the thousands you’ll spend in tuition, books, computers and coffee.
"Paper sucks. Cornell Notes suck."
At HackCollege we cover a wide variety of note taking methods and tools. Admittedly for certain classes, a laptop just seems more efficient than paper. On the other hand, I find writing notes out by hand with drawn visual aids takes learning to a whole different level. This varies greatly from person to person, we encourage you to employ what ever technique gets you the grade. Similarly for Cornell Notes, the extra processing and massaging of recorded information has shown to be beneficial in many subject areas. Quality Regular lined notebooks are widely available, this is isn't the case for Cornell Lined notebooks. The Ultimate Note-taking Notebook is attempting to solve this problem. Drawing out the Cornell lines on a blank page prior to the start of lecture is a pain in the... It’s much easier to let your printer do the work all at once at the begging of the semester.
"You're pretentious."
That's quite possibly true, but there is a premium niche that needs to be satisfied in all markets. Many buy a Mac because they "just work", others buy BMW's for the "German engineering", the Ultimate Note-Taking Notebook is designed to be a joy to write on and make it through the whole semester. If that's what you're are looking for, then I suggest you put in a few minutes of effort and whip up a batch.
Reader Comments (10)
I had mine printed on 60lb paper which is pretty great but the price got pretty high. Four books for $60 was what I was quoted from the local print shop. I ordered them anyways and when I picked them up I realized what was so expensive about them. When I was asked how many pages I wanted I made a measure with my hands that was about a half inch thick and said I wanted them that thick. As it turns out they had twice the pages that I asked for. I now have four large multi subject size Cornell notebooks. I better like this Cornell stuff as I've got enough pages here to last me into Grad school.
I personally really liked the idea for the Cornell notebooks, though I'm simplifying it by simply printing Cornell Template at my local photocopy centre at 5 cents a page, with holes and then putting them in a binder. I would love to pay the extra amount for making my own notebooks, and doing all the perforating, etc etc, but I don't need it, so I'm taking a more simplistic approach.
You can copy and paste or make your own template like this, and put it into one-note for microsoft. COMPLETE organization
You've got me thinking now about the kind of notebook which would suit me ~:-)
For me graph paper is always a win... Easy to convert to Cornell style notes, good for graphs and almost anything in a math/engineering/science class. Very easy to customize your organization when you use graph paper.
First of all, I would like to strongly discourage the following: take advantage of the office photocopier in the last few days of your summer internship". Unless you have authorization to do so, and not just from a co-worker who told you that everybody does it, but from the hr rep, printing personal items at work is stealing and could land you in trouble. Just pay for whatever it costs at the school's print shop.
I think this ultimate notebook is a good idea if you can afford it. However, I think that before spending all this money, you should try it for one course for a semester first to see how you like it and if it is for you. Secondly, you could print the sheets at home or at school or regular or premium paper without buying the most expensive one. Finally, using a 1 inch binder or a flexbinder to put the sheets in would be cheaper, at least in the long run. I have five flexbinders that I paid 10 bucks each for. They are pretty much like a notebook for 3-hole punched paper. However, at the end of the semester, I transfer each course to a super cheap 2" binder. It doesn't matter that it's cheap because I will rarely ever have to go back. That way, you can reuse the same high quality binders every semester.
"Admittedly for certain classes, a laptop just seems more efficient than paper. On the other hand, I find writing notes out by hand with drawn visual aids takes learning to a whole different level.
"
'drawn visual aids', mind mapping? concept mapping? Very doable with a good computer software program, better, an integrated learning system... that is, how it is implemented is CRITICAL important.
This problem is solved.
"Cornell Notes", it should be provided and easily available with any serious learning tool...
Advice:
Evaluate various learning systems/tools and then decide which one to stick to...
You'll find time well spent.
As nice as cornell notes are, my note-taking style tends to be too free-form for its rigidity (I blamed it on the ADHD, but whatever). I'm a big fan of old-school composition books, which are very cheap and really fun to write in (at least for me). Additionally, the com book is fairly easy to scan in a flatbed (but not in a drop-in).
Not trying to knock it, but it's rather expensive for just taking notes
I like the cornell note taking method, but I modified it slightly. Made more sense to me to have the Ques column to the right of the note taking area - that way you can see Ques by just barely lifting the page or by flipping through the pages. Also, the Summary seemed redundant to my note-taking method, so I got rid of it - I tend to summarize/que in the Que column. FInally, I modified the lines in the note-taking area into Grids. Works better for drawing, notes, etc. I made all of these mods in the MS Word version of the Cornell notes page.
This seems a little expensive and impractical for the average college student but an awesome way to take notes nonetheless. It really makes you more involved in the note taking process from a mental standpoint. Kudos.