While people approach creative actions in diverse ways, navigating them effectively requires self-regulatory effort. In this preregistered experiment, we examined whether simple self-regulation prompts, provided across the stages of the creative process, make the outcomes more creative. Participants (N = 332) engaged in one of three creativity tasks--designing a logo, writing a short story, or preparing a greeting card--and documented their ongoing progress with photos. During the task, half of the participants received prompts tailored to their task progress, encouraging the employment of various self-regulatory mechanisms (e.g., uncertainty acceptance, adjusting approach). Consistent with our predictions, promoting a strategic approach throughout the task led participants to develop more creative products than those in the no-prompt condition. Moreover, we demonstrated two indirect paths behind the prompts' effectiveness: first, via enhancing positive active emotions, and second, through fostering a greater time commitment to the task. On a theoretical level, the proposed prompting approach highlights the advantages of self-regulatory engagement during creative actions beyond solely idea generation strategies. Methodologically, our study underscores the simplicity of such interventions and their potential broad applicability.