Our lives are filled with distractions. There are the business distractions that come in the form of urgent emails just as we began working on the project we’ve been trying to complete for a week, and there are the inevitable personal distractions that require us to focus our attention even though we may have to sacrifice our business time and effort.

With the day-to-day toils of responsibility and the endless stream of information to which we must attend, focusing our thoughts on good ideas of significant quality is not an easy matter. Multi-tasking, despite the hype, is not necessarily the desirable state we want to attain  and we find ourselves surrounded with tasks from all sides, each item asking for a bit of input and often taking away from the other problems we would love to solve. We find ourselves craving more time for our own creative process.

When we do catch that rare moment of insight, it is often fleeting. It is as if great ideas seem to come from nowhere, and disappear just as quick. The novelist Virginia Woolf summed it up best when she wrote that genius “resembles the lighthouse in its working, which sends one ray and then no more for a time; save that genius is much more capricious in its mainifestations and may flash six or seven beams in quick succession and then lapse into darkness for a year or for ever.”

In order for us to transform our “genius” into action, we must move quickly. Fresh ideas have a way of turning sour as we second-guess ourselves and the self-criticism sets in. Just putting the thought into words is a vital first step to prove our ideas are truly innovative and worthy of our time. To validate the feasibility of our ideas, we go to our favorite search engine, or drive to the local library, and start seeking the answers for the many questions we face.

The entire process of creative thought, from birth to inception (or untimely death, as the case may be) is time-consuming, cumbersome, and may lead to various dead-ends along the way. Each step may lead to a loss of faith and the idea could evaporate under the distractions around us. In order to come to fast conclusions, it is imperative to make the process as efficient as possible.

I believe this is where the natural language processing (NLP) systems such as IBM’s Watson  play a major role.

We think in words and words are an extension of our natural language. Rather than having to translate our thoughts into a written format, as we do with search engine keywords, or designing more solid definitions through intensive study, computers geared towards natural language have the ability to process our spoken questions on-the-fly, saving valuable time and effort. Ultimately, ideas with rapid positive feedback can flourish, achieving much higher quality results and perhaps even spawning additional creative concepts that could benefit the masses.

This is not to say that tools like Watson will be the end-all, be-all reference guides for each idea that has a potential for success. It has always been human intelligence that drives innovation and humans will continue to be the best judge of their own insights. By keeping creativity at the highest level of language, people can focus on the concepts instead of worrying about proper computer syntax or formal mathematical logic. That’s one less distraction in a world where time for creative thinking is highly valued..