Beyond Productivity: How AI Agents are Reshaping my Wellbeing

As we wrap up the year, I've been reflecting on how my use of AI has evolved. The biggest theme for my AI activities in 2025 has been a shift in mindset: moving away from just asking questions, and instead getting AI agents to directly help me execute complex tasks.

Here is a look at the three main ecosystems I’ve lived in this year and how I’m using them. 1. CLAUDE: Building Specialised Skills Many people haven’t jumped onto Claude (from Anthropic), or they view it purely as a master coding system. While it is a coding monster, the real power lies in using Claude to create "skills."

These are specialised agents that greatly enhance its ability to assist you. The best part? You can get Claude to write these skills for you.

For example, I asked Claude to build me a skill to assist my life as an independent business consultant. Here is the system prompt it wrote for itself: "Act as a high-level business consultant for complex strategic decisions. Use when users need help with business decisions, strategic choices, problem analysis, or trade-off evaluation.

Triggers include phrases like 'should I...', 'help me decide', 'what's the best approach', 'analyze this decision', 'strategic options', pricing decisions, market entry, resource allocation, product strategy, or any complex business problem requiring structured analysis...(it continued on like this...)"

You simply save that skill to Claude (using Projects). The next time you need it, you just say "Use the strategic business skill to..." and it super-tunes itself to your specific context. Magic! 2. CHAT GPTs: The Knowledge Vault Throughout the year, I built a variety of specialised GPTs on topics ranging from assisting me on the various Boards I sit on, to policy writing, offbeat travel planning, and building community resilience to climate change impacts.

Note: You do need to be on a paid plan to create these. The power comes from uploading your own documents to supercharge the AI’s context. For instance, for my offbeat travel agent, I combined deep research reports on travel photography with reports on offbeat locations around Australia and the world.

Once created, Chat uses that specialised data alongside its general training. The result is significantly better than what you get from a standard "Chat 5.2" session.

OpenAI has also released their image generating and editing system (making Adobe Photoshop- style edits easy for beginners). It's decent, though I still find myself preferring Google Nanobanana Pro for visuals like making amazing infographics.. 3. GOOGLE: The Workspace of 2026?

Google was absolutely on fire in 2025. The NotebookLM research system was updated and supercharged with Gemini 3.

Privacy Note: If you have a paid Google account, you get the ability to ensure your data isn't used for "training," giving you much-needed peace of mind.

It is impossible to cover everything, but here is my standout workflow for the year. I load up to 60 documents at a time into NotebookLM and ask it to create a podcast or video overview to help me understand the material.

But don't stop there. To get real value, I ask it these three critical questions (adapted from youtu.be/OVKIs8MRzvY?si=0Gd2stPkccTgnWVr ):

1. What material is missing from this collection that would make its coverage more comprehensive?
2. What material is most inconsistent with the major themes in my collection?
3. What material would contribute to arguing against the major themes and further reinforce the themes? The App Workflow As of this week, you can now create Tables inside NotebookLM to help explore complex topics.

Here's a partial snippet of the table it made from my happiness research sources:

Here is the killer feature: You can export this Table as a Sheet and download it. Then, go inside Gemini, upload that Sheet, and ask it to create an interactive widget to help you explore the topic. Here's an example from my table:

Aspects to maximise or minimise wellbeing

The interesting thing is that these AI tools can actually help with all the "maximise wellbeing" states! You just need to harness them to their potential. (Ask me if you want more tips - it's not my paid job, but I'm happy to share with my learnings, just as I've learned from many others).

With this powerful ecosystem integration, Google has become my favourite workspace of 2026.

Here's the infographic NotebookLM made about the science of leading a happier life (much of it references the research of Dr. Laurie Santos: Courses, Talks, and Podcast and Sonja Lyubomirsky so I want to acknowledge these wonderful women right now... as well as Paige Bailey Grace Leung who lead the way into how to use these AI tools in a variety of life expanding ways).

And finally, this is Nanobana3 Pro (paid version) summarising this newsletter of my year in 2025 with AI tools: See content credentials

Google Nanobanana Pro summarises Paul's year of experimenting with AI

Happy end of year to everyone! Feel free to share your findings. Paul