Previous work on criticism and creativity suggests that people often critique their own work during creative efforts. While the role and importance of evaluating ideas has been established in the creativity literature, less is known about the impact of providing task-related self-critiques in earlier/mid creative process stages. Additionally, very few studies have sought to identify what attributes of self-criticisms are either helpful or hurtful during different stages of the creative process, and under certain conditions. In the present effort, an empirical examination of self-criticism attributes, self-criticism timing, and self-criticism context was conducted. Undergraduates were asked to take on the role of a marketing consultant and develop an advertising campaign for a failing company. During this task, participants provided task-related self-criticisms of their work during the problem definition, information gathering, concept selection, or concept combination stage of the creative process. Subsequently, they were asked to generate a list of ideas and a final plan for solving the marketing task. It was found that the impact of providing self-criticisms during certain creative process stages and under certain contexts depends on the characteristics of the criticism. Specifically, providing high-quality and complex self-criticisms during early-mid stages of the creative process (i.e., information gathering and concept selection) led to the highest levels of creative performance. Additionally, providing complex, practical, and deep criticisms under high levels of task complexity proved important.